If there is one topic that attracts the attention of the public, the press, and the scientific world, it is climate change. In the last year, above all, consideration has grown exponentially given the criticality that the problem is assuming.
ESA, the European Space Agency, has recently released an animation made with 57 radar images captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite over the course of one year, from February 2019 and February 2020. What we are witnessing is decidedly worrying: an iceberg of over 310 square kilometers has detached from the Pine Island glacier in Antarctica. The glacier in question is perhaps the most at risk in the area, it is estimated that if it were to collapse completely, it would trigger a global sea-level rise of 1.20 meters. Since 2012, the Pine Island glacier has poured 58 billion tons of ice per year.
But there was someone who was already at the forefront of climate change awareness thirty years ago.
In 1989 an expedition through Antarctica was organized. The purpose of this mission was to focus the attention of international public opinion on the signs that climate change was already causing at the time.
Among the main sponsors of that crossing was the W. L. Gore & Associates, well known for the production of GORE-TEX® products.
The American company supplied the protagonists of the expedition with custom-made Trans Antarctica jackets, designed to withstand the extreme conditions of the Antarctic continent. That mission had an unexpected success, it attracted the attention to the problem in a very strong way also thanks to some choices that we could define “marketing”.
For the realization of the jackets specific and unconventional colors were chosen: red, turquoise and purple. This choice was made because these colors for their particular visibility on television, in addition, purple was particularly amplified by the reflective properties of the snow.
All this also gave the mission an appealing aesthetic that not only made the problem of climate change “popular” but also established GORE-TEX® products as a leader in the technical outerwear sector and beyond, a status it still maintains today.
