Hundreds pose naked on Swiss glacier

By Anne Richardson

ALETSCH GLACIER, Switzerland (Reuters) - Hundreds of people posed naked on Switzerland's shrinking Aletsch glacier on Saturday for U.S. photographer Spencer Tunick as part of a Greenpeace campaign to raise awareness of global warming.

Tunick, perched on a ladder and using a megaphone, directed nearly 600 volunteers from all over Europe and photographed them on a rocky outcrop overlooking the glacier, which is the largest in the Alps.

Later he took pictures of them standing in groups on the mass of ice and lying down. Camera crews were staged at five different points on the glacier to take photographs.

Glaciers are sensitive to climate change and have been receding since the start of the industrial age but the pace of shrinkage has accelerated in recent years.

The environmental group Greenpeace, which organised the shoot, said the aim was to "establish a symbolic relationship between the vulnerability of the melting glacier and the human body."

The Aletsch descends around the south side of the Jungfrau mountain in the Upper Rhone Valley.

The volunteers walked for several hours in the mountains to reach the glacier before taking their clothes off briefly for the shoot in temperatures of around 10 degrees Celsius (50.00F).

Alpine glaciers have lost about one-third of their length and half their volume over the past 150 years. The Aletsch ice mass has retreated by 115 metres (377 ft) in the last two years alone, said Greenpeace.