Game demonstrates impact of climate change on Antarctic
Read the full article on http://scienmag.com/
“Scientists and games developers have joined forces to help communicate the impact of climate change on the Antarctic Ice Sheet. The ice held in the Antarctic Ice Sheet has the potential to cause significant changes in sea level in the future, which will affect many people around the world. As a result, it is important that people have an awareness of the impact of a changing climate on the world’s ice sheets, but this complex system is difficult to understand and predict. Now the scientists and games developers have produced a free-to-use interactive game, “Ice Flows”, to help demonstrate how the Antarctic Ice Sheet responds to climate change in an accessible way to children and game players of all ages.
The game, which can be played at http://www.iceflowsgame.com, will be launched at the SCAR (Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research) Open Science Conference in Kuala Lumpur on the 23rd August. It will be free to download from app stores. The game is built on a simple representation of how ice flows in Antarctica and how it responds to changes in the environment – through changes in snowfall and ocean temperature. It allows players to impose climatic changes to control the extent of the ice sheet to guide penguins to fish; if they get it wrong, the penguin may meet its doom in the jaws of a leopard seal. The aim is to promote understanding of the complexity of the ice sheet system by enabling the player to carry out their own ice sheet model experiments, much like the scientists working on the research. The game has a number of levels representing how different parts of the Antarctic will respond to climate change.”
