Climate change has pushed Earth into the uncanny valley, a liminal area that is increasingly unrecognizable and terrifyingly strange. We’ve left 10,000 years of familiarity at the door and crossed the threshold into a new frontier—one we’re wholly unprepared to navigate.

Like the blank margins of old maps, this uncharted valley is filled with monsters. It’s a place where not even genetics are safe from the scalpel. Where cultures are digitized before they disappear under the rising sea and ice from a melting glacier can cool a cocktail in a bar half a world away.

Charting a course through this monstrous fog is this century’s ultimate expedition. I’m curious whether we’ll adopt this strangely-altered world as “our new nature” or lament what we’ve lost? Will we stay in our air conditioned and filtered homes, eyes glued to VR, or step into the dampened sunshine and inhale deeply the acrid smoke?

Uncharted will be about the often overlooked but far more common impact of the climate crisis in the near term: weirdness. Most people won’t experience a wildfire in their life but they will breathe in toxic particles from its smoke. This gray area is hard to define and even harder to make sense of—but it’s our new unnerving reality.

I don’t know how to get out of this mess but I suspect, maybe even fear, what happens when we’ve crossed the valley and the monsters we’ve created are indistinguishable from what once was. When kids play on refrigerated sand in indoor beaches and lovers lay on gene-spliced grass to gaze upon clouds seeded by silver.

Every few weeks I’ll post a visual essay on climate uncanniness and the visits I’ve made to these strange lands. My goal is to help define the contours of the valley as we chart a course through it, observe just how fucking weird this all is, and leave a trail of breadcrumbs in the hope we may one day find our way back.