Nude Photos In The Swiss Alps? It's For The Cause

Some 600 volunteers bared all in the Swiss Alps this weekend to call attention to the denuding of the glaciers in the famous mountainscape.

Staged by Greenpeace, the amateur nude models were the latest captured on film by Spencer Tunick, who has made himself famous with such mass naked portraits. The point, as Greenpeace put it, was to demonstrate the vulnerability of the earth to global warming by displaying the body at its most vulnerable.

"Without clothes, the human body is vulnerable, exposed, its life or death at the whim of the elements. Global warming is stripping away our glaciers and leaving our entire planet vulnerable to extreme weather, floods, sea-level rise, global decreases in carrying capacity and agricultural production, fresh water shortages, disease and mass human dislocations."

The people posed standing -- and lying in snow -- in front of the glacier, which according to Greenpeace will have disappeared -- along with most glaciers in Switzerland by 2080. The size of alpine glaciers have slipped one third in the past 150 years, and the situation is much the same across the world, with famous glaciers like those in Glacier National Park in the United States rapidly shrinking.

Besides losing a beautiful natural landscape, losing glaciers can have serious consequences for alpine ecosystems -- and the millions that rely on drinking water flowing from the mountains.

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