Melting glaciers and warming oceans – from Art for Planet Earth touring exhibitions 2024/5

You may be interested (or, more likely, horrified) to learn that in 2017, at the bottom of the Pacific’s 10km deep Mariana Trench, considered the deepest part of the world’s oceans, a robotic submersible found, wait for it ... a tin of Spam, a bottle of Budweiser and plastic bags!

Additionally, scientists discovered “extraordinary” levels of toxic pollution in the crustaceans living in the pitch-black waters of the Trench which go all the way up the food chain to whales, dolphins and fish. These sky-high levels of toxins are PCBs banned in the 70s. As well as fifty-year old contamination, we’re now continuing to foul our oceans with single use plastics, plastic micro-beads, discarded fishing nets, liquid spills, petroleum wastes, noise pollution, agricultural runoff and sewage. There’s currently an ocean garbage patch twice the size of Texas on our blue planet containing 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic.

The story in my painting is about the rapid melting of the glaciers due to man-made greenhouse gas emissions. The impact on sea mammals and animals that live on the ice is portrayed by the sleeping polar bear on a tiny ice flow, unable to feed as the ice is melting at an alarming rate as the warm water under the glaciers accelerates the fracturing of the ice. At particular risk are the Thwaites glacier and the Ross Ice Shelf. Warming oceans and pollution mean the bleaching of 300 year old coral reefs by acidification and disruption of sea mammals’ migration and breeding patterns.

Two young people are gazing at a clock and piles of garbage as time runs out. His arm is around her as protection, but their ice flow will melt soon too. Economic ‘progress’ and alienation from our environment has irrevocably transformed our planet.

I hope my passion to chronicle this story through my art will help all of us to cope through activism and awareness with what I believe is an evolutionary shift that we are irrevocably moving towards.