Message from Andrea Juan.
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Since 2002 I have been working with art projects related to the climate changes. My previous work was developed into Patagonia’s glaciers in South America and it concerned to desitegrations of ice shelves.
In 2005 and 2006 I was in Antarctica were I carried out a series of “performances” and video installations in Marambio, Esperanza and Jubany bases, projecting videos onto the glaciers and others antarctic landscapes. The work has been registered in photography and video.
Antarctica is a pristine and virgin continent. There are no possessions, belongings or Nations sovereignty on it, just scientists and military representation of their countries working there.
The project was based on a group of Argentinean scientist from “Direccion Nacional del Antartico”, Buenos Aires, Argentina, who carried out an ambitious mission in Peninsula Antarctica to study the global warming process. This is due to the fact that over the last 50 years, evidence of ice cap disintegration, has been obtained specially in this part of the continent where the surface has changed because of the disappearance of Larsen A and B Ice shelf.
The expedition’s aim is to raise awareness on consequences of natural venting of methane gas related to greenhouse effect. The scientist has extracted 900 ice proofs in 7 meters deep of solid sea in order to study this process. They consider that Polar Regions may contain, in the form of methane gas the 50 % of carbon that exist in the rest of the world. A historical record, based on analysis of air bubbles trapped by ice sheets, indicates that methane is more abundant in the Earth?s atmosphere now than at any time during the past 400,000 years.
Methane gas is considered 10 times more harmful as greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and on top of this it is a kind of gas that came from the emanation of living species / vegetal and humans. Methane (CH4) is a main component of natural gas. It is also formed and released into the atmosphere by biological processes occurring in anaerobic environments. Once in the atmosphere, methane absorbs terrestrial infrared radiation that would otherwise escape to space. This property can contribute to the warming of the atmosphere, which is why methane is a greenhouse gas. Methane is about 21 times more powerful at warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide (CO2) by weight.
YASMIN – The perception of climate change (June 2006)