I gave five talks about my exhibit up at the ICA in Boston last night–8 minutes five times in a row.  After the blinding headache that ensued no doubt from the effects of my own droning repetition, I started thinking about the most significant part of what I was saying about the project.  Basically the images I was talking about, as you see here, take DEMs from glaciologists studying the dynamic response of the mass balance of glaciers around the world to environmental factors and I render them in a 3D program with temperature, light, cloud, snow covers that are relatively accurate to the sites (the picture you see here is the edge of the Austfonna glacier in the northernmost tip of Norway, an area known to be a common jumping off point for early north pole expeditions).  I then insert these tableaux of vaudevillian performers (here Mike Waters, the project manager for the ICA building construction supervises Naomi Greenfield, a local balloon artist, making an umiak, a common boat form in the arctic, out of pin balloons).

The Ayles ice Shelf, one of a number of key ice masses in the Arctic, has been found to have broken free from land; as noted in the wikipedia:

“The Ayles ice Shelf was one of six major ice shelves in Canada, all located on the northern coast of Ellesmere Island, Nunavut. The ice shelf broke off from the coast on August 13, 2005, forming a giant ice island 37 metres (120ft) thick and measuring around 9 miles by 3 miles in size (approximately 66 square kilometers or 25.5 square miles in area). The oldest ice in the ice shelf was believed to be over 3,000 years old. The ice shelf was located at (83°1.5′N 77°33.5′W), approximately 800 kilometers (497 miles) south of the North Pole.”

I’m always interested in seeking out other forms of interdisciplinary collaboration, which seem to be increasingly prevalent these days. One such form is the International Polar Year 07/08; their effort is described as:

The concept of the International Polar Year 2007-2008 is of an international programme of coordinated, interdisciplinary scientific research and observations in the Earth’s polar regions:

• to explore new scientific frontiers
• to deepen our understanding of polar processes and their global linkages
• to increase our ability to detect changes, to attract and develop the next generation of polar scientists, engineers and logistics experts
• to capture the interest of schoolchildren, the public and decision-makers.

Interestingly the first IPY was in 1882-83 and was the first international year of anything. Polar explorer Karl Weyprecht realized that the poles were the places where significant geophysical concerns were located–he felt that one nation or one research institution alone could not address such a vast and complex area, so he created an international scientific cooperative effort. There is a great site that looks at this history from the NOAA.

When I wrote my new book on global and arctic climate change, I chose to call it The north pole Was Here because scientists had posted a goofy sign on the sea ice near 90 Degrees North with that phrase on it — marking the fact that the camp was drifting 400 yards an hour. It also referred to the idea that the north pole of our history could soon going to be history, given the changes afoot in climate up north. Now both computer climate simulations and fresh measurements of sea-ice trends are both pointing to a much quicker transition to open water around the Pole in summers than earlier studies had projected — possibly by 2040.

I have a story in today’s New York Times on that new work. There are some links in the piece to animations generated by the model and more.

“There is some of the same fitness in a man’s building his own house that there is in a bird’s building its own nest. Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged?” -Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Ecological history underscores our terrestrial issues. How much and how fast has the climate changed? How far are such changes man-induced? Is nature in balance? Are humans helpless to stem — or bound to alter — natural processes? Has humanity on the whole improved or spoiled the Earth? In what sense do environmental misuse and reform matter? Today’s ecological concerns trigger these essentially historical questions. Save for the subject of oppressed minorities, no aspect of history is currently so resurgent as that of the environment. Past historians habitually disjoined nature from history. As recently as 1984, Donald Worster found “little history in the study of nature, and little nature in the study of history”. history –the annals of civilization — is derived from recollections and written records. By contrast, erudition of nature — Earth and Cosmos — emerged from material residues, theoretical logic, and verifying research. history was a humanistic enterprise, ecology a scientific one. Analogies abounded, “the book of nature” was a common cliche, and historical “science” was recurrently trendy. But most scholars stressed the disparate temporal horizons, subject matter, and sources of the two realms and slighted their parallels. Nature was mundane and mindless, history the sublime drama of human will. To be sure, historians never forgot that men and women required terrestrial abodes for food and shelter, even for sanctuary and faith. And the reciprocal influences of locale and life perennially intrigue chroniclers. At least since Herodotus, historians have invoked landscape and terrain, climate and soils to explain why peoples and nations differ. In the Western world, human dominion over nature was decreed by the deity and lent added impetus by Enlightenment science. While ecologists doggedly termed nature mankind’s master, devotees of advancement saw nature as mankind’s servant. Thus design should fit within nature not enslave it. Design, like the Thoreaus’ bird nest, is in tune with the narrative of place. design cannot be seperate from its history. BUT much of design history does not consider nature directly. What next???

mongabay.com
December 7, 2006

If past climate change is any indication, Earth could be in store for some significant global warming according to research published in the December 8, 2006, issue of the journal Science. The work suggests that climate change skeptics may be fighting a losing cause.

The study, led by Mark Pagani, associate professor of geology and geophysics at Yale, looked at an episode of rapid climate change that occurred some 55 million years ago. Known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), the period was marked by a rapid rise in greenhouse gases that heated Earth by roughly 9° F (5° C), in less than 10,000 years. The climate warming caused widespread changes including mass extinction in the world’s oceans due to acidification and shifts of plant communities due to changes in rainfall. The era helped set the stage for the “Age of Mammals,” which included the first appearance of modern primates.

When I pull up the steel pole containing the core ice sample of what I did in 2006, the unifying element to the work is the idea that only social change halts climate change.

In the summer I did a couple of benefit gigs for this week-long Camp for Climate Action. In September the Camp for Climate Action tried to shut down Drax power station, Britain’s single largest carbon spewer. The benefit gigs were performed in autonomous social centres in the north of England.

I spoke in London’s Trafalgar Square at a Stop Climate Chaos rally ( I’ll post the text soon). There were a lot of young kids there come to see the pop bands that were on, and I’m sure most of ‘em were just thinking: ‘Why is that nasty, unshaven man so angry? Shouldn’t he be happy that we’ve saved the planet already by our judicious consumer choices? In the same way that we ended corporate rule of the Global South with Live 8?’