Disko Bay Expedition

On the chartered plane on the way to Kangerlussuaq to meet the boat I am sitting next to the author Lemn Sissay, who writes witty and beautiful poetry amazingly quickly. He is reading poetry and I am reading my new camera manual, which sums up a few things. Then we start seeing poetry in the camera manual: focus point, focus lock, release mode, live view, auto sensitivity, aperture priority,exposure compensation, colour space, interrupt interval, white balance.

White balance is a good metaphor for some of what Cape Farewell is about. How the polar ice caps help keep the delicate balance that has given the earth its remarkably stable, and self stabilising, climate for a few thousand years. We are seeing that balance being upset in an unimaginably forceful way. Simon, one of the scientists in our crew, was telling me how he had recently come across some climate predictions modelled in 2001 and realised that the ice cover reductions predicted to happen by 2050 had already happened in 2007 and 2008…

Read Sunand Prasad’s full blog post on the The Architect’s Journal website.