International Arctic Systems for Observing the Atmosphere (IASOA) IPY Press release – Feb. 10, 2009, Boulder, CO Download IASOA Press Release as PDF For more information visit our IPY Media Day page at www.iasoa.org Climate observatories at Barrow, Alaska, Summit, Greenland, and Tiksi, Russia all lie between 71° and 73° North, a few hundred miles above the Arctic Circle—but the sites are hardly similar otherwise. A...

Circumpolar treeline research by the IPY core project PPS Arctic Fieldwork in Northern Norway: recording and mapping stand density, tree recruitment and age structure of Scots pine stand close to treeline. Photo: A. Hofgaard Are trees invading the Arctic? The ‘expected’ answer to this question is ‘Yes’: but is this really true? The expectation is based on some rather simple models that relate the position of the treeline to the local climate. In its simplest form, the idea is that it is too cold for trees to exist north of the present-day treeline, so a warming climate ought to p...

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 ...

Video release: Simultaneous Solstice, covering the summer solstice tag-up between the Phoenix Mars Mission and South Pole teams, as well as images from the Mars lander. Press release: Antarctic expedition prepared researchers for Mars project About half a year before the robotic arm on NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander began digging into soil and subsurface ice of an arctic plain of Mars, six scientists traveled to one of the coldest, driest places on Earth for soil-and-ice studies that would end up aiding analysis of the Mars data. ...

http://ipy.arcticportal.org/index.php?option=com_k2&id=1997&view=itemPress release: Kinnvika - Arctic warming and impact research - Change and variability of Arctic systems, with focus on Nordaustlandet, Svalbard Kinnvika is a project within the International Polar Year 2007–2008 that focuses on Arctic warming and impact research. Its a multinational and multidisciplinary initiative to enhance the understanding of the Arctic climate systems, to monitor environmental change due to global climate warming and to study effects of human activity in the Arctic. Kinnvika is also a logistic platform for scientists to manage research, with a base at the old Kinnvika station in Svalbard. There are 25 working packages in the project and the science involves several disciplines in the Earth Sciences including studies among others on ...

New York City will host its third International Polar Weekend at the American Museum of Natural History on Saturday and Sunday 2/7 and 2/8 from noon to 5PM each day. This family style event is a New York celebration of highlights from the International Polar Year (IPY). The weekend will include activities for all ages, including performances; short lectures; film clips with commentary; and an interactive Polar Fair with scientists, explorers, artists, and performers from Greenland, Norway, and Canada, as well as the United States. Event highlights include:

(c) National Science Foundation After years of planning, strategizing, and international discussions and debate, what once seemed to be only lofty scientific ambitions are now closer than ever to becoming a reality. Ever since subglacial lakes captured the imagination of scientists and the public more than a decade ago, researchers have dreamed of entering and sampling these alien environments to unlock secrets that might guide us in the search for life elsewhere in our solar system. The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research’s (SCAR) Scientific Research Program (SRP) on Subglacial Antarctic Lake Envir...

Photo Credit - AGAP team There were many times in the last two months where it seemed that the Antarctic Continent would win, keeping hidden the extensive landscape of subglacial lakes and mountains beneath the several kilometers of ice on Dome A. All the advance planning and negotiating with program leaders and logistics groups for enough days in the field to run the airborne geophysics were of little importance once we arrived on Antarctica. At this point we were negotiating with the continent herself, and we learned she can drive a hard bargain! The group at AGAP S camp had anticipated...

My name is Henry Stanislaw and I am from the USA. Together with Maria Puig Ribas from Spain, Nora Hasselbach and Vincent Butty from Switzerland, Alexandra Le Dily from France and Carlien Wolmarans from South Africa, I joined the Young Explorer Program within Mike Horn’s PANGAEA Expedition. This program is created to introduce young adults to exploration, but also to scientific working and learning about the environmental conditions and threats. The first trip in this program took us to Antarctica. Mike is starting his expedition here, where he will walk alone from the Peninsula to the South Pole and back. For all of us this is the first contact with a polar environment. We started in Ushuaia / Tierra del Fuego, South ...

In order to move work teams to the AGAP camps we must move everyone through the South Pole in order to acclimatize to the high altitude. This has presented a bottleneck of sorts, and along with other delays is putting the project considerably behind schedule. With equipment calibrated and people antsy to move out of McMurdo the next focus is how to move people through the next short stop at South Pole. A spreadsheet has been made and people have been moved back and forth on the sheet in response to weather delays and changing shifting. For days people have had bags sorted and checked waiting...