Giant Roo Tests Climate

By Hayley Birch

There are many situations in which a 100ft-high cardboard cut-out of a kangaroo could come in handy. The launch of Skippy the Movie, as a warning for giant marsupial-shaped alien invaders… Oh alright, there aren’t that many situations, but there’s at least one: in highlighting the effects of climate change on polar ice.

Now this may sound like a bizarre way to broach the subject of our rapidly shrinking ice caps, but you’ve got to give the Australians ten points for creativity. The huge white kangaroo pictured below is just one of twenty cut-outs positioned around the globe designed to show how white patches on the Earth, like ice caps, reflect the Sun’s rays and help to counter their warming effect. Academics at Monash University in Melbourne decided to customise their “white space”. Professor Vickers-Rich said, “We were supposed to do a square and we thought ‘Well, why don’t we do an animal?’”

Monash University's attempt to attract attention to the melting ice caps

Other participating centres include the Science Museum of Virginia and the Technopolis centre in Belgium. In a somewhat mystifying but nonetheless imaginative move, students at the Henri Bergson High School in Paris laid out a giant snowflake.

Between 19th – 24th May, NASA satellites will take pictures of the white spots from space. The resulting data will demonstrate how white spaces reflect light, as opposed to dark patches, which absorb it – this is known as the albedo effect.

True to form, the good old British weather interfered with plans of the team at the Null’s local participating centre. Staff at Techniquest science centre in Cardiff were allotted a time of 12:07 for their satellite photo shoot. “At about 12:06 the biggest patch of cloud you’ve ever seen came over,” said Helen Hughes, press officer for Techniquest. “It’s not been brilliant because of the weather but the idea was to do something that would create a bit of a buzz about climate change.”

So, there might have been the odd hiccup, but let’s face it - there’s nothing like a giant kangaroo being photographed from space to create a bit of a buzz.

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