By Boris Pavlov, Year 11
Facebook and Instagram have recently experienced a movement known as the 10 Year Challenge. Its premise is simple enough: compare a picture from 2009 to one from 2019, and although it started out with pictures of people, it has quickly grown into an awareness campaign.
Environmental Activist Groups such as Greenpeace have taken the opportunity to highlight the rapidly shrinking ice caps, estimated at over negative 127 gigatons annually by NASA. The kicker is that the pictures aren’t even the shocking bit. The fact that many of them are as little as 3 years apart is.
Global warming has been talked about for decades to no avail. But the Challenge is presenting a median unlike those often used to house the discussion. Most of us know how serious the issue is, but seeing it on such a vast scale is truly terrifying.
Social media allows for information to spread at immense rates, and perhaps that’s what we finally need to start solving the problem of climate change. It isn’t something we can procrastinate any longer. The deadline is here. Extreme weather is already being felt in Australia with intense heats, Europe with nonstop snow and avalanches, and now, the ice caps.
Entire ecosystems are being thrown out of balance and temperatures have risen almost an entire degree. The 10 year challenge has not only highlighted that, but also the potential and hope for change. WWF has specifically used it to show how working together has achieved improvement in many areas, just as inaction has led to some of these problems.
In the end, the 10 Year Challenge gives us a final opportunity to unite and save the world we live in, and reminds us of the necessity to do so if we wish for it to be here for the next 10 Year Challenge.
