Art for Save Arctic Campaign, As Antarctic Glaciers Melt Faster

Not to make light of the climate change impacts on the Antarctic and the Arctic, but Since Greenpeace launched the Save The Arctic campaign it has seen an amazing amount of creativity and visual design, both from its talented supporters and the people who work at Greenpeace. So its encouraging a creative approach to Saving the Arctic from big pol and others who want to exploit this special place. But sometimes it’s hard to find the right tools for the job. At at the other end of the earth, news that the largest glacier in East Antarctica, containing ice equivalent to a six-metre (20-foot) rise in global sea levels, is melting due to warm ocean water, Australian scientists said this week. Read more

Arctic and Antarctic – story on Antarctic melt and something on Arctic re stop the drilling

Warm ocean melting East Antarctica’s largest glacier

Report from AFP (26 January 2015)

The largest glacier in East Antarctica, containing ice equivalent to a six-metre (20-foot) rise in global sea levels, is melting due to warm ocean water, Australian scientists said on Monday.

The 120-kilometre (74.4 mile) long Totten Glacier, which is more than 30 kilometres wide, had been thought to be in an area untouched by warmer currents.

But a just-returned voyage to the frozen region found the waters around the glacier were warmer than expected and likely melting the ice from below.

“We knew that the glacier was thinning from the satellite data, and we didn’t know why,” the voyage’s chief scientist Steve Rintoul told AFP.

He said that up until recently the East Antarctica ice sheet had been thought surrounded by cold waters and therefore very stable and unlikely to change much.

But the voyage found that waters around the glacier were some 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than other areas visited on the same trip during the southern hemisphere summer.

“We made it to the front of the glacier and we measured temperatures that were warm enough to drive significant melt,” Rintoul said.

“And so the fact that warm water can reach this glacier is a sign that East Antarctica is potentially more vulnerable to changes in the ocean driven by climate change than we used to think.”

Previous expeditions had been unable to get close to the glacier due to heavy ice, but Rintoul said the weather had held for the Aurora Australis icebreaker and a team of scientists and technicians from the Australian Antarctic Division and other bodies.

Rintoul said the glacier was not about to melt entirely overnight and cause a six-metre rise in sea levels, but the research was important as scientists try to predict how changes in ocean temperatures will impact on ice sheets.

“This study is a step towards better understanding of exactly which parts of the ice sheets are vulnerable to ocean warming and that is the sort of information that we can then use to improve our predictions of future sea level rises,” he said.

“East Antarctica is not as protected from change as we use to think,” he said.

The melt rate of glaciers in the fastest-melting part of Antarctica has tripled over the past decade, analysis of the past 21 years showed, according to research published last month.

Source: www.news.yahoo.com/warm-ocean-melting-east-antarcticas-largest-glacier-071912713.html

The Arctic needs your creativity

Greenpeace Blogpost by James Turner  (2 February 2015):

Save the Arctic Style Guide

Since we launched the Save The Arctic campaign we’ve seen an amazing amount of creativity and visual design, both from our talented supporters and the people who work here at Greenpeace. But sometimes it’s hard to find the right tools for the job.

Today we’re hoping to make it even easier to get involved by releasing an Arctic Style Guide.

As well as offering you colours, fonts and templates we’re also opening up a small selection of our best images and videos for you to download and use.

This is just one way we’re hoping to build a more ‘open source’ movement, where everyone can find different ways to contribute their talents and skills to help protect the Arctic.

Beginners welcome

You don’t have to be professional designer to use this guide. With help from our friends at Fake Crow we’ve tried to make it as simple as possible, so that if you just want to download an image and use it as wallpaper on your computer, well, that’s fine. At the same time we’ve included some suggestions on how to create a flyer or a smart email, things you can use to help persuade others to join this growing movement.

There are icons, fonts, palettes, and all sorts of other goodies. We want you to use these as a starting point for your work, a way to enhance your natural creativity. These aren’t rules, they’re suggestions, and we all know that sometimes the rebellious mind produces the best ideas.

Save the Arctic Style Guide

Overall we offer this to you as a tool – something we hope you will use to show the world the incredible beauty of the Arctic and the vibrancy of the movement that’s building to protect it.

We hope you like it. And please don’t forget to share you work with us, using the email address we’ve set up for this purpose: arctic_styleguide@greenpeace.org.

Competition time

Today we’re also launching a new competition to encourage our supporters to create images, videos or any other type of content for the campaign.*

We’ll share the best entries on social media, and the most popular will win a Vivienne Westwood Arctic T-Shirt and one of the actual expedition jackets we took to the North Pole.

Creativity vs. Arctic oil

Oil companies like Shell seem to have all the money in the world – and some pretty huge advertising budgets too. But we have ideas, imagination and creativity on our side. That’s incredibly important.

And it’s one of the reasons why we’re going to win.

So it’s over to you. Have fun, experiment and get started!

* Competition details

The competition is open to anyone – Greenpeace staff, our supporters and their friends. It will run from until 1 April  2015.

After this time we will place the best 10 entries on our Facebook page, and the winning entry (in terms of shares and overall engagement) will receive the prize. If you’ve made something that can’t be shared directly on Facebook (like a drawing or object), take a picture of it and we will contact you separately.

To enter the competition, please email your content to arctic_styleguide@greenpeace.org with the word ‘competition’ in the subject line. Please do not share your work directly on our Facebook page as we cannot assess entries this way.

Thanks, and good luck!

Source: www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/makingwaves/save-the-arctic/blog/52019/