Virtual Arctic Installation in London

United Visual Artists has teamed up with London’s National Maritime Museum to create High Arctic - a gigantic exhibition that will give visitors a taste of what it’s like to travel to the Arctic.

Inspired by a trip to Svalbard, research for the installation involved sailing on the Noorderlicht, a 100-year-old Dutch schooner, with climate scientists, artists poets and musicians

Wired.co.uk say: “the aim is to inspire a cultural response to the climate challenge and engage artists as catalysts to provoke cultural shift toward a more sustainable society”.

Exhibiting in London’s National Maritime Museum, 3,000 white pillars will echo the shapes of the glaciers of the Arctic, with columns of “ice” made out of MDF or a specially coated polystyrene.

The piece is set in 2111, reflecting on the fate of lost glaciers, and is accompanied by a narrative poem, which contemplates the history and future of the landscape.

High Arctic will be on display at the National Maritime Museum in London this summer.

You can take a closer look in Wired UK’s High Arctic image gallery.
Read full article at wired.co.uk

Melting Montana : ‘Glacier Park’ to become ‘Park’ by 2020

Glacier Park became the USA’s 11th National Park on May 11th 1910 and last week celebrated its 100th birthday, minus around 125 of it’s original glaciers that were thought to have been present a century ago.

Located in northern Montana, this one million acre park incorporates two ranges of the Rocky Mountains, is home to hundred of species of endemic plants and animals and safeguards rare mammals such as the wolverine and lynx. The mountains, which started forming 170 million years ago, are considered to have some of the finest fossilised examples of extremely early life found anywhere on Earth.


However, if current climatic trends persist, Scientists have predicted that the park’s 25 remaining glaciers may disappear within the next decade. Dan Fagre, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist suggests that average temperatures within the park have risen 1.8 times faster than the global average, an impact that is visible in the huge moraine piles left by retreating glaciers, now littering the landscape.

Temperature increases have also been linked to wildfires and diminishing stream-flows, bringing worrying concerns for fish populations and big predators such as grizzly bears and wolves. Rising temperatures have also meant that spring has started arriving about early, causing winter snow to melt earlier and forests to become drier, causing more destructive fires later in the summer.

Around 2 million visitors visit the park each year, with many now lured by the opportunity to see the glaciers before they finally disappear.

Experts warn that the consequences hold further reaching warnings for the future of our global ecosystems. Journalist Nicholas Geranios recently referred to Glacier Park as a ‘harbinger of Earth's future, a laboratory where changes in the environment will likely show up first’.

Photo from planetware.com

Lucy's article was also posted by Responsible Travel

Greener Passenger Planes on the Horizon

Airplanes are well known for their negative environmental impacts, in terms of noise, nitrogen oxide emissions and carbon dumping.

Industry is currently thought to be the world’s biggest contributor to global warming but The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, based in England, estimates that by 2050, emissions from planes are expected to be in close competition.

With increasing global dependence on air travel, we need to either reduce aircraft travel or change it, the latter being the preferable choice for most travellers, and so researchers at MIT (Nasa’s Mission Integration Team) are designing a completely new type of ‘green’’ airplane.
The “double bubble” series are designed for domestic flights and can take up to 180 passengers. They are planned to replace the most popular jetliner in the world, the Boeing 737. They will use two partial cylinders placed side by side, creating a wider structure and placed further back than Boeing 737 engines, with the overall aim of reducing drag on the aircraft, thus requiring less fuel.
MIT have high expectations of the new aircrafts, saying that they will be quieter, burn 70% less fuel, emit 75% less nitrogen oxides and take off from shorter runways. Less fuel consumption could also mean that flight prices could be lowered by up to 25%.

Sounds fantastic but don’t hold your breath. MIT is still awaiting confirmation from NASA on whether its design has advanced to the next phase of the space agency's program and it is likely to be a couple decades before any of these planes make it onto the runway. NASA's goal is that “double bubble” will take off by 2035.

Lucy's article was also posted by Responsible Travel