On January 12 2008, Bernice Notenboom became the first Dutch woman to reach the South Pole. During her month-long expedition, Bernice and her team studied the effects of climate change on the ice, snow and glaciers of Antarctica. In the Spring of 2009, with the support of a Polartec Challenge Grant, Bernice summitted Everest and collected data on the effects of climate change on the mountain for her project Himalaya Alert. The following Fall we posted some of her footage in a blog post that you can read here.
According to the website, “Climate Change has often been described as a slow-moving catastrophe. It’s the kind of issue that once you begin to feel any large-scale effects, it’s too late to do anything. Though science has been telling us this for 25 years now, this is what makes it a very difficult problem to communicate to the general public.
Bernice Notenboom’s expedition to Mt Everest, offered a rare opportunity to explore the changes going on in one of the world’s Climate Change hotspots. Going beyond graphs and tables and what is often fairly abstract science, Himalaya Alert searches out the views of local people and records the concrete physical changes actually occurring at high altitude. This combined with the adventure and drama of the expedition itself opens up these issues to a broad general audience.
The Sherpa people are among the first to experience the tangible effects of a warming planet. For them this means living with the uneasy mix of the danger of flooding, from bursting glacial lakes, combined with drought, caused by a continued reduction in rain and snowfall, which is threatening their agricultural base. The likely fate of Himalayan glaciers is hugely important because they are the source for 10 of Asia’s largest rivers. Climate Change is not only causing glaciers to melt, it is also shifting the monsoon. In the short term at least, this looks like having a much bigger effect on river flow than the melting alone.”
Check out the most recent footage from the Himalaya Alert documentary, courtesy of EMS Films.
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