In conjunction with this event, several IPY partners have released new information about their projects. Here are some examples:
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Global Interagency IPY Polar Year Snapshot GIIPSY
GIIPSY has been central in the research behind this announcement. that the Wilkins Ice Shelf is Under Threat. New rifts have developed on the Wilkins Ice Shelf that could lead to the opening of the ice bridge that has been preventing the ice shelf from disintegrating and breaking away from the Antarctic Peninsula.
GIIPSY investigators have also been involved in the following research:
DLR’s TerraSAR-X contributes to international fleet of radar satellites to map the Arctic and Antarctica
Monitoring the North and South Polar Regions using the ALOS/PALSAR,
& obtaining images such as this ice island in the Arctic
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Solar Linkages To Atmospheric Processes SLAP
SLAP is an International Polar Year project investigating the links between changes in solar output and weather and climate. This SLAP release discusses their research into weather and climate from the Antarctic extremes, and includes an interview with Evgeny Gruzinov, a leading engineer-geophysicist of the Russian Antarctic Expeditions (RAE), who has been working with Ausralian and Russian teams on this project and has almost spent a compete year at Vostok station.
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Nordic Ionospheric Sounding rocket Seeding Experiment NISSE
In the NISSE experiment, about 11 kg water will be released into the atmosphere at the REXUS 6 rocket’s apogee altitude of about 95 km. The tri-static EISCAT UHF incoherent scatter radar system located in Northern Fennoscandia, in Tromsø, Norway, Kiruna, Sweden, and Sodankylä, Finland, will be used for the detection and observation of the impact of the released water on the upper atmosphere/ionosphere. Students involved in this project are sharing their adventures on www.IPY.org.
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Large methane emissions from permafrost areas during freeze-in
A joint effort between monitoring and cutting edge research has discovered a surprisingly large methane burst during onset of freezing at Zackenberg in NE-Greenland. These IPY results have just been published in Nature.
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In addition to exciting new science discoveries, students around the world will be connecting directly to researchers involved in these projects and learning more about atmospheric and space research in their classrooms.
For more information about any of these aspects, please visit the Above the Poles webpages.