Luca Parmitano spoke about his participation, in August 2021, in a monitoring expedition to the Gorner Glacier in Switzerland, on behalf of the European Space Agency (ESA), together with other experts: the researcher Frank Paul and the glaciologist Daniel Farinotti, both researchers in Zurich.
His testimony is clear:
Luca recounts: “What we are observing is a photo of the past: every year the glacier retreats, it shrinks. No change in policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will be able to bring this glacier, all the glaciers, back to where they were. And over the next 40 years this process will continue. My children will not be able to see the glacier as I saw it. Visiting the glacier in person and seeing it as it is today, knowing that next year it will already be different, has a great emotional impact. Today I am here as a witness to something that is happening, a very worried witness.”
There are also numerous photographic records that Parmitano was able to observe during his Beyond mission, which ended in February 2020. Climate change and the effects of human activities are clearly visible from above, from a privileged vantage point: aboard the International Space Station (ISS), at an altitude of about 400 km. Parmitano said: “Already in 2013, during the Volare mission, we photographed various climatic effects, but what I saw only a few years later is striking.”
The 2019 fires in Australia and in the Amazon rainforest are just some of the clear signs of how human activity has an impact on the global ecosystem. Activities of this kind increase the level of sand in the atmosphere, alter the cycle of currents and the intensity of weather events on a global scale, and tear land away from biodiversity to make room for intensive human cultivation.
The warming of the average temperature of the Earth and the consequent rise in sea levels will lead, in the coming decades, to the disappearance of parts of the planet.
Parmitano’s talk finally ended with an appeal to young people: “The planet does not belong to you, but its future is in your hands. I hope this presentation has given you a sense of urgency. You must have the strength to act, be hungry for change, be the change.”
Photo by: FEDERICA MOALLI
