Climate change campaigners strip naked on melting glacier  

Nearly 600 volunteers have stripped for the camera on a melting Swiss glacier high in the Alps for a publicity campaign to expose the impact of climate change.

The environmental group Greenpeace, which commissioned the photo shoot by world-renowned photographer Spencer Tunick, says the volunteers turned up under blue skies near the foot of the Aletsch glacier, a protected UNESCO World Heritage site.

Nicolas de Roten of Greenpeace Switzerland says there are almost 600 people there.

"It's relatively chilly but that doesn't seem to be disturbing them," he said.

The campaign is aimed at drawing attention to melting Alpine glaciers, one clear sign of global warming and of man-made climate change, Greenpeace says.

Greenpeace says the human body is as vulnerable as glaciers like the Aletsch in southern Switzerland - which is shrinking by more than 100 metres a year - and the world's environment.

The group hopes its billboard and poster campaign showing people exposed to the cold will send a shiver down the spines of the public and politicians, and convince them to do more to tackle pollution and climate change.

"They'll be used at the right moment for our campaign, in Switzerland first and then worldwide," Mr de Roten says.

Tunick split the volunteers into two groups of about 300 for separate shots on or around the lower end of the spectacular 23 kilometre long sweeping ice floe, at an altitude of about 2,300 metres and about an hour's hike away from the village of Bettmeralp.

Temperatures were well above freezing - about 10 to 15 degrees Celsius - unlike the riskier snowbound section higher up in the mountains.

The US-born photographer is renowned for his spectacular art photos of hundreds if not thousands of naked people grouped in carefully chosen poses around landmarks.

Tunick calls them "living sculptures" or "body landscapes" and these days he works mainly to order for contemporary galleries.

About 18,000 nudes posed for the US-born photographer in Mexico City's Zocalo Square in May.

Other backdrops have included the Gateshead Centre for Contemporary Art in Britain (2005), the Biennale in Lyon, France (2005), and Grand Central Station in New York (2003).
http://www.abc.net.au/new...