Artic trip for Chiswick couple

Oct 7 2008 By Jessica Thomas

Robyn Hitchcock

A Chiswick couple have finished an epic journey to the arctic with a boat full of celebs.

Robyn Hitchcock and Michele Noach, joined a team of over 40 international artists, journalists and scientists on an exhibition to Disko Bay near Greenland to report on what sort of effect global warming is having on the Arctic Circle.

Singers Jarvis Cocker, Kt Tunstall and Vanessa Carlton were some of the more famous musicians among the team which left Greenland on Thursday, September 25.

The boat voyaged to the Jakobashavn Glacier, one of Greenland's largest glaciers, moving at a faster rate than ever before and losing 20 million tones of ice every day.

Robyn, a renowned singer songwriter (formerly of the Soft Boys) and his partner Michele, a painter and cartoonist, were two of the group formed by Cape Farewell, a charity which brings together artists, scientists and communicators to produce art based on climate change.

Robyn and Michele blogged on a daily basis on www.capefarewell.com/diskobay.

Robyn recently posted on his blog: "I cannot begin to start or stop describing this place. To say something is grey means little, it is green also. And white.

"[We are going to] Jakobshavn, tomorrow, where a great glacier has infinitesimally crumbled into the sea over the centuries; less infinitesimally of late - the glacier has lost 15 km over the last 10 years. It becomes thousands of luminous blue icebergs. One of them appeared outside our porthole, in the sea, this morning. We all photographed it, as if it was a firstborn child."