Warming Seas
Our oceans absorb all the excess heat we generate on this planet
Lewis’s pioneering swim across the North Pole in 2007 demonstrated the climate crisis in action; it should not have been possible to swim over the North Pole, which should have been covered in ice.
Ten years after he first trained here, Lewis returned to his Svalbard to prepare for the Arctic Sea Ice swim. When he’d trained at Longyearbyen in 2005, the water temperature was 3°C; a decade on it was 10°C.
In 2021 Lewis swam across Greenland’s Ilulissat Icefjord, fed by the world’s fastest moving glacier – which produced some dangerously large and speedy ice bergs – in the lead up to the COP26 Climate Summit.
Coral, like ice, is a visual barometer that indicates the effects of warming seas on ocean life. In 2022, Lewis swam across the Red Sea to highlight the perilous state of the world’s corals, and the extraordinary coral in this part of the world. The coral here may be particularly adaptable and tenacious, but If we continue to warm our planet on the current trajectory, it will be the very last coral to survive.
