Winnipeg, Canada — 18 February 2009 — The University of Manitoba-led project that gained worldwide appeal and interest will be one of the highlights of a conference in Europe Feb. 25, 2009 as International Polar Year (IPY) wraps. An IPY committee will release its State of Polar Research report at that time to summarize all the IPY studies, one of the largest of which was led by a climate change expert at the University of Manitoba. “Our data is coming in and our team is looking forward to the next phase of our research,” says Barber, David Barber, Canada Research Chair in Arctic System Science and director of the Centre for Earth Observation Science (CEOS) at the University of Manitoba. “IPY gave us this tremendous window into climate change. What we learned about...

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 ...

Antarctica receives almost 50,000 visitors a year, if you count both those who disembark and those who sail or over fly the continent without landing. Is it now for the Antarctic Treaty or the governments involved to regulate Antarctic Tourism? Should we start talking about quotas and/or other measures to protect the most pristine region in the world? Photographer, cruise manager and guide Juan Kratzmaier summarizes a conference talk he gave on the topic at the Institute of Marine Sciences in Barcelona for the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in ...

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...

Fundació Caixa Catalunya in collaboration with the American Museum of Natural History is organizing a travelling exhibition entitled “Trapped in the Ice: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition” containing the original pictures taken by James Francis Hurley during the expedition. This exhibition also presents information about research and the current situation in Antarctica together with details of the International Polar Year, and is accompanied by a series of lectures and educational activities addressed to primary and secondary students. This exhibition is touring Spain for two years, coincidi...

WIN A WEEK ABOARD AN ARCTIC ICEBREAKER!! (INCLUDING TRANSPORTATION FROM YOUR HOME COUNTRY) In April 2008, join journalists from all over the world for a week aboard the Canadian research icebreaker Amundsen. The World Federation of Science Journalists—in collaboration with the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the International Polar Year Circumpolar Flaw Lead Project—announces a competition offering science journalists the chance to win one of three week-long trips aboard the Canadian research icebreaker Amundsen. You will fly all the way to Inuvik (Canada), and hop aboard a Twin Otter aircraft to the famous icebreaker, where you will get first hand experience of global warming where it is unfolding the fastest. ENTRY GUIDELINES...

The Spanish Polar Programme are currently organizing a multidisciplinary, international sampling season at Byers Peninsula (Livingston Island, South Shetland Islands, Antarctica) for austral summer 2008/09. This call is open to all scientists who may be interested in doing field research at this site, or in working with samples collected from terrestrial, freshwater and marine coastal environments of this region. The proposed investigations should be within one or more the following themes: 1. Global climate change 2. UV radiation effects 3. Antarctic biodiversity and community ecology 4. Environmental assessment of science and tourist activities 5. - Palaeoecological studies Byers Peninsula is Antarctic Specia...

The National R&D Plan will finance six polar research projects this summer. The Oceanography Research Ship Hesperides, carrying out two projects, will travel to the Arctic Ocean for the first time. June 18, 2007. On June 20, the Hesperides will initiate the Spanish arctic campaign held in honour of the International Polar Year, co-ordinated in Spain by the Ministry of Science and Education (MEC). This is the first time the research ship, sailing from Vigo, will carry out projects in the Arctic Ocean. These projects are Spain's contribution to the objectives of the Polar Year, an international initiative aimed at increasing the knowledge of polar regions and the implications of climate change on a global level. The first project of t...

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 ...