Pledge for change: NYC artist collaborates with NASA; gets Earth's surface temperature tattooed!

Image courtesy: Justin Guariglia/Instagram

New Delhi: Living amidst the hustle and bustle of New York City is an artist by the name of Justin Guariglia, who launched a partnership with American space giant NASA on September 16th.

Guariglia is a citizen of the world who has long since possessed a desperate urge to learn and understand the impact of human behaviour on the planet and the changes that Earth goes through because of it.

As per a report in Co.Exist, for years, his art has explored the implications of the Anthropocene – the new epoch that the International Geological Congress voted to declare just a few weeks ago, based on the fact that the planet’s land, water, air, and life systems have been so influenced by humans that we have pushed the Earth into a new epoch on the geological time scale. The Holocene, the Earth’s current epoch, has lasted 12,000 years since the end of the last Ice Age.

So desperate is his thirst for knowledge that the day geologists made their announcement in August, he went out and got a tattoo.

"The tattoo was in commemoration of what the IGC had formalized," he told Co.Exist. "It’s just another way I’m kind of reminding myself of this issue."

The tattoo is a running five year average of the planet’s surface temperature anomaly, from 1880 to 2016 and begins from his wrist and goes all the way up till his shoulder.

It is incredible because it captures how the Earth’s temperature deviates from historical averages and going by the data released by NASA, the average has been on a rise since 1970.

In fact, every month for the last 11 months has been the warmest month ever in the last 136 years, with August being declared as the warmest month of 2016.

Shocked with the lack of public response to the International Geological Congress decision, Guariglia told Co.Exist that, “It should have been on the front page, the New York Times didn’t put it anywhere.”

Guariglia is getting ready to embark on a new mission with NASA, Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG for short). His role in that mission will be to garner people's attention – and his work won’t look anything like the graph on his arm, Co.Exist reported.

Check out the tattoo which he posted on his Instagram account!

Commemorating the news that we've officially entered the Anthropocene, I've tattooed NASA's GISTEMP global temp 5 year mean index onto my arm in an art performance piece. The carbon (soot and ash pigment) tattoo was permanently applied the same day the announcement was made by Jan Zalasiewicz and Colin Waters at the IGC. The index tracks global temperature rise from 1880-2016. Video to be unveiled in the next few days. Tattoo by the amazingly talented @fksegismundo #anthropocene #anthropoceneart #performanceart #nasa #nasagoddard #giss #temperaturerising #tattoo #climatechange #globalwarming #welcometotheanthropocene

A video posted by Justin Guariglia (@justinguariglia) on Aug 31, 2016 at 8:18am PDT