Lewis Pugh swims under ice-sheet in Antarctica to raise awareness on climate change

GUWAHATI: Lewis Pugh, UN Patron of the Oceans, swam under ice-sheet in East Antarctica to raise awareness about climate change.

“East Antarctica is the coldest place on earth, and yet I was able to swim down a river under the ice-sheet. It was the most beautiful and terrifying experience of my life, and comes with an important message for us all,” he tweeted.

The endurance swimmer wrote about his experiences in a blog post.

“I swam for 10 minutes and 17 seconds. It felt like 10 days before the team finally pulled me out.

The water temperature was just above 0°C, the air temperature well below that, and I was frozen to my core,” he wrote.

“So why was I attempting to swim here? Quite simply to demonstrate the rapid changes that are taking place in Antarctica, and to call for the urgent establishment of a network of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) around Antarctica, starting with a one million km² MPA here, in East Antarctica,” he further writes.

Pugh recommends that an MPA will protect this” last wilderness from the industrial overfishing that has devastated all the oceans of the world, and crucially make this region more resilient to the climate crisis.”

It is important to note that according to the Climate Risk Index 2020, an annual report by Germanwatch, which ranks countries according to their vulnerability to extreme weather events, India ranked fifth in the overall global vulnerability index in 2018, ranked first in terms of fatalities and second in the world in terms of losses in millions of dollars.

India’s overall ranking has drastically fallen from 14th in 2017, to fifth in 2018. The report shows that extreme weather, linked with climate change, is affecting not only the poorer countries like Myanmar and Haiti but also some of the world’s richest countries.

Japan is the worst-hit country in 2018, while Germany and Canada were both also in the ‘bottom 10’ i.e. the most affected.

The results reflect the increasing damage caused by heatwaves, which scientists have found are being worsened by climate change.

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