'10 year challenge' calls attention to striking changes the Earth has seen

What: The hashtag promoting the “10 year challenge”, the latest trend on social media, has resulted in the collation of striking images of how the earth has changed over the last one decade. From colossal glaciers being reduced to a few bits of ice, and thriving, colourful coral reefs being reduced to a mass of bleached wasteland, these pictures have come as a frightening wakeup call to the effects of climate change and global warming.
 
Much like the Kiki challenge, which saw people posting dancing videos, the 10-year challenge also started as a fun activity, but one that was easier to do than Kiki, where one had to jump out of slow-moving cars and dance (to hell with traffic and safety regulations). Compared to that, fishing for old photos and lining them up with current ones seemed easy and innocuous enough. This was till netizens pointed out that the one thing that should concern us is not the loss or addition of love handles or tattoos, but how mankind has drastically altered the home planet.

 
How: The call to the challenge was simple enough: post pictures from 2008 and 2018, or 2009 and 2019 side by side, and add the game’s hashtag, #10YearChallenge. Among the many who dove headlong to participate in this were celebrities right from Sonam Kapoor and Shilpa Shetty to Ellen DeGeneres. Blame it on their genes, boundless resources or the underrated plain healthy living, they all seemed untouched by the ravages of time. Too bad the same can’t be said about the earth.
 

Even as people continued to share pictures of personal transformations over the last decade, Kate O’Neill, author of several books (Tech Humanist being one) posted what she describes as a semi-sarcastic tweet on how the whole challenge could easily be an exercise to mine personal data to train facial recognition algorithms on age progression and age recognition. As cyber experts have opined, this is a scary thought in itself. (Facebook denies creating the challenge.) But undeniably the silver lining out of all of this is the way concerned global citizens have capitalised on the trend to show how fast our world is changing.

 
Where: The effects of melting ice caps, widespread pollution, unchecked concretisation and overpopulation are being felt across the globe. Antarctica is losing about 127 gigatonnes of ice mass every year, while Greenland loses 286 gigatonnes annually.
 
Actor Leonardo DiCaprio’s foundation, which focuses on environmental preservation, has used the challenge to create awareness about the drastic difference in the Amazon rainforest cover. Another post calls to attention the dangers of discarding plastic without thought: the same plastic bottle from 2009 pretty much floats around in 2019, too. Closer home, the #10YearChallenge has been used to address everything from as serious as Delhi’s downgraded air quality to joking about tarred roads that continue to be broken.

 
The United Nations has warned that we have only 12 years to limit the effects of climate change (extreme heat, drought and floods, among others). And as India’s increased tiger count shows (about 1,411 to 2,226 in the recent past), perhaps there’s still hope for the world.