Polar Bears and Penguins May Live at Opposite Poles, But Census of Marine Life Explorers Find Hundreds of Identical Species Thrive in Both Arctic and Antarctic Contacts: Mr. Terry Collins, +1-416-878-8712; +1-416-538-8712; This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it Ms. Darlene Trew Crist, +1-401-295-1356; +1-401-952-7692; This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it Mr. Gregg Schmidt, +1-202- 448-1231; This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it Experts are available for advance interviews. Video and high-resolution images are online at www.coml.org/embargo/polar2009 Download PDF of CoML IPY Press Release for i...

EBA is a complex interdisciplinary project involving over 40 research groups from approximately 22 nations, as well as links to the Arctic research community. Its work crosses traditional disciplinary divides within biology, in particular working across the marine and terrestrial realms. EBA has multiple aims reflected in its structure of 5 work packages. At a broad scale, these packages are aimed at understanding how the various ecosystems of Antarctica are structured and function, what historical processes have shaped them to be as they are now, what evolutionary processes have taken place in the Antarctic environment and, in turn, what that tells us about the environment itself. Finally, in the context of parts of Antarctica currently facing the fastest rates of environmental change on ...

“Preserve the Polar Regions and Glaciers”: A major philatelic event for the closing of IPY in March 2009 Last Saturday September 20t 2008, at the “Austria Center Vienna”, a few steps from the UN Headquarter in Vienna, have been officially presented the major philatelic event concerning the “International Polar Year 2007-2009”. To pay tribute to all the efforts made during this fourth “International Polar Year” 2007-2009 and to deliver a strong message aimed at the whole world, the postal administrations of around 40 countries have decided to joint to produce a common stamp issue concerning the problem of the Global Warming and featuring the slogan “Preserve the Polar Regions and Glaciers”. Started ...

On Tuesday, April 8, middle- and high-school students from Fairbanks, Shageluk and Wasilla, Alaska, will join with students from the other end of the globe, in Ushuaia, Argentina, in a live two-hour videoconference that is part of International Polar Year (IPY) activities at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF). The students will respond to a focus question about the important seasonal indicators in their area (such as budburst, leaves changing colors, or river/lake freeze-up or break-up), and how those indicators may be impacted by climate change. They will then discuss their answers with each other and with several arctic and antarctic scientists who will be on hand. This videoconference, similar to one that was held a year ago on the UAF campus, is part of an Internat...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE April 4, 2008 Children near both poles will have a chance to talk to each other and scientists about changes they are seeing in their own environments and how people are adapting to those changes during an International Polar Year pole-to-pole videoconference Tuesday, April 8, at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Through the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment program, known as GLOBE, students in Fairbanks, Shageluk and Wasilla, Alaska will exchange their research ideas and interact with students from Ushuaia, Argentina, as well as with scientists from Alaska, Colorado and Argentina. The exchange is part of the IPY GLOBE Seasons and Biomes project, which trains K-12 teachers and students ...

By Andrea Juan, Curator, "Polar South, Art in Antarctica" at the Museum of National University of Tres de Febrero in Buenos Aires, Argentina The light is so intense and bright that it modifies the colors throughout the day, while the horizon line blends into a white plane where the sun bounces and never sets. A deep and vivid feeling seizes us when, at the end of a long voyage, we step on Antarctic soil, a soil covered with fossils. As sea, rock, and time, Antarctica is today the largest natural freshwater reserve for humankind. Being there is to witness a different world on thi...

Wednesday 23rd January 2008 We are crossing the mid-ocean South-east Indian Ridge. An email from Rob bobbed up yesterday inviting me to check out his maps which show how the great plates dividing the planet affect the ocean floor. At around -54 South and 143 East you can see the suture line that separates the great Australia plate from the Antarctic plate. I can see on the echo sounder where we have been traveling. It's a very flat and deep area to around 5000m. This is Old Earth. Suddenly bumpy hills several hundred metres high start to appear. The ground continues to be rough and then the clear line of the axis shows where the earth has literally torn apart. This is where we cross into New Earth, a landscape of undersea volcanoes, basalt and larva, which ha...

Terrestrial ecosystems in ARctic and ANTarctic: Effects of UV Light, Liquefying ice, and Ascending temperatures. (TARANTELLA, IPY project no. 59) IPY project page TARENTELLA website Predicted changes in climate and ozone concentrations in Polar regions, make it critically important to understand how changes in key environmental factors influence Polar terrestrial ecosystems via the modification of their individual but interconnected components. Observational and experimental research on the effect of climate change and ozone depletion is affiliated to international research programmes to t...

Argentina invites artists to contribute to the electronic exhibition of the Interpolar Poetic Art Gallery. Argentina will host an "Interpolar Poetic Art" Gallery during May as a pre-launch for the Interpolar Poetic Art Post Card Project at the Dreamland Pub, in Ushuaia. We would be very happy to hear from any other polar artists or projects who would like to participate with their art work. After the artistic and cultural exchange pre-launch actions, the project will consist of a Multimedia Exchange Installation, inspired by environmental phenomena, and an open proposal on raising awareness and comprehension about the polar areas and their fundamental role in th...

On March 1 2007, students at schools around the world marked the advent of International Polar year by conducting an ice experiment. They then told the IPY community and the world by pinning a virtual balloon onto a web-based map showing exactly where they were. It proved to be quite a success, with hundreds of schools contributing so far. IPY enthusiasts also joined in, turning the map into a riot of red balloons. See the whole map here. For technical reasons, browsers don't like it if you show too many balloons at one time, so only the most recent 200 balloons are shown. However, you can see all contributed posts directly by browsing the directory from ...