Hundreds Pose Naked on Melting Swiss Glacier

GENEVA, Switzerland, August 22, 2007 (ENS) - Six hundred people stripped naked and posed for the camera on a glacier in the Swiss Alps Saturday to dramatize the need for drastic action to avert global warming.

American installation artist Spencer Tunick and Greenpeace Switzerland presented the living sculpture on the Aletsch Glacier to "symbolize the vulnerability of the glaciers under climate change," Greenpeace said in a statement.

Known around the world for his installations featuring large numbers of nude people posed in artistic formations, Tunick wants people to know that global climate change is not an abstract issue, but a hazardous threat which affects us all.

"I want my images to go more than skin-deep," he said. "I want the viewers to feel the vulnerability of their existence and how it relates closely to the sensitivity of the world's glaciers."

A few dozen of the 600 people who stripped on the Aletsch Glacier. August 18, 2007 (Photo by Spencer Tunick courtesy Greenpeace Switzerland)

Tunick has photographed thousands of nudes in locations from a tulip field in a small Dutch town, to Selfridges London store, to an event in Barcelona with 7,000 people involved.

For his largest installation, in May Tunick photographed over 18,000 naked people in Mexico City at the Zocalo, the former Aztec town square that is now the second largest public plaza in the world.

For the Aletsch installation, Greenpeace advertised on its website for volunteers. Participants were told they would not "be naked for very long."

"Without clothes, the human body is vulnerable, exposed, its life or death at the whim of the elements," said Greenpeace."Global warming is stripping away our glaciers and leaving our entire planet vulnerable to extreme weather, floods, sea-level rise, global decreases in carrying capacity and agricultural production, fresh water shortages, disease and mass human dislocations."

Aletsch Glacier, the largest glacier in the Swiss Alps, covers more than 120 square kilometres (45 square miles) in southern Switzerland.

This glacier retreated 115 meters (377 feet) in a single year from 2005 to 2006.

The glacier is expected to shrink 80 percent by 2100, according to Ralph Logon, a Swiss geomorphologist and expert on glaciers.

If global warming continues at its current rate, most glaciers in Switzerland will completely disappear by 2080, leaving nothing but valleys and slopes strewn with rock debris, warns Greenpeace.

Over the last 150 years, alpine glaciers have reduced in size by about one third of their surface and half of their mass, and this melting is accelerating.

The environmental group cites the most recent report on the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which said the world only has until 2015 to take the urgent action needed to curb the most severe effects of climate change. Without swift action, the damage could become irreversible.

"Never before has humanity been forced to grapple with such an immense environmental crisis," Greenpeace said.

Greenpeace is calling on all governments to make "courageous political decisions to radically cut greenhouse gas emissions and stabilize global warming."

On the screen saver Greenpeace has created from the installation, the message is, "Wear-nothing activists to do-nothing politicians: stop global warming now!"

Copyright Environment News Service (ENS) 2007. All rights reserved.