extreme
“As the earth inhales greater amounts of carbondioxide, the earth’s poles are exhaling less ice over the course of their seasonal cycle; ice shelves are disintegrating; glaciers are disappearing and the temperatures of both the air and the seas are rising. With each contaminated breath, the complex biological balance of the Earth, as we know it, dies a little.”
Antarctica: A call to action, Sebastian Copeland
The Antarctic is the coldest, windiest, driest, most isolated and most uninhabited place on earth. It is the planet’s last wilderness. The Antarctic plays a key role in sustaining the world’s temperature. In 2008, the earth was 1.4 degrees warmer than it was 100 years previously, with the expectation that by 2100 the temperature would have risen to 4 degrees. In 2008, sea ice in the Antarctic Peninsula was recorded as having receded by 40%. Melting glaciers raise ocean levels and the disappearance of ice affects ocean conditions, currents and temperatures, and this in turn affects the migration of fish. The Ozone hole above the Antarctic is the result of our continuing use of CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons).
Sara Davidmann and Catherine Faulds visited the Antarctic Peninsula in December 2013 in order to collect material for a collaborative project using photography, underwater video, sound and word.
The journey was made in the Antarctic summer where Davidmann and Faulds saw the reality of this ecology. This voyage brought home to Davidmann and Faulds the extent to which the continent is continually in movement - rising, for example, with every winter's snowfall (the Antarctic doubles in size), melting and fragmenting in summer- and, consequently, how much of it is hidden.
extreme was exhibited in a two-person show in 2015 at the Glass Tank, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford OX3 0BP.
