April 2009 – BLUE Champions

This month, one of our BLUE Champions, Antony Jinman successfully completed his six-week Artic expedition filming the effects of climate change. Antony skied 150km solo across Baffin Island in temperatures as low at minus 40 degrees C to document how environmental change is affecting the native Inuit people.

Despite being struck down with stomach flu at the start of his expedition, Antony continued on with his expedition. The explorer described the Arctic as the “front line of climate change” and said the landscape, people and wildlife were already seeing dramatic, sometimes devastating effects. He witnessed first hand the effects of the high temperatures and heavy rain of last year’s summer, which resulted in flooding and erosion of moraines in the Auyuittug National Park. This area is known as the ‘Land that never melts’ by the Inuits, who have been watching their landscape change and in fact have been seeing that the land is indeed “melting”.

Antony will be undertaking another expedition starting on April 19 to travel 500 km across Greenland as part of his Schools Outreach Project.

For further information about all of our BLUE Champions, please go to:
“www.theblueproject.org/bluechampions”:www.theblueproject.org/bluechampions

Conrad Humphreys
Triple round the world sailor and
Founder of The BLUE Project