Rob Giampietro, Water’s Rising
“As it was for so many, Al Gore’s
An Inconvenient Truth was a huge wake-up call for me. In that film, Gore offered many hard facts that highlight the urgency of our current situation, but one stood out: He suggested sea levels could rise twenty feet or more ‘in the near future,’ placing a sizable portion of the world at risk of being underwater by the end of the century. While recent reports have adjusted Gore’s estimate — a 2008 study in the journal Science projects a rise of 2.5 to 6.5 feet by 2100 — even that more modest increase is significant, potentially affecting 145 million people or more.
“My poster attempts to visualize this uncertain future, counting off the century in five-year increments and showing how quickly and completely our landscape could be altered if we do not act now to stop it. Formally, I was thinking back to Emil Ruder’s experiments with harmonic shifts in type size in the 1960s. The poster uses Compacta, a typeface designed by Fred Lambert that dates from the same time period as Ruder’s work and which I’ve used in many of own recent personal projects. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock, aka ‘Five [Seven?] Minutes to Midnight,’ was very much in my mind as well. I’ve always thought that graphic is a stark, stirring reminder of the price of apathy.”
— RG
GO FURTHER:
www.sciencemag.org
