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By Peter Rejcek, Antarctic Sun Editor
What is the International Polar Year?
The simple answer is that the International Polar Year,
or IPY, is an intensive, two-year study of the Arctic
and Antarctic. It began March 2007 and runs until March
2009, which gives scientists two field seasons to conduct
research.
But the IPY is much more. It’s about creating long-standing
legacies of international research collaborations; capturing
the world’s imagination in science and exploration;
and inspiring future generations of scientists and engineers.
If it sounds familiar, perhaps you’ve heard of the
International Geophysical Year (IGY), the model upon which
the IPY was based. Fifty years ago, amid the climate of
the Cold War, scientists from scores of nations banded
together to probe and measure the globe like never before,
emboldened by new technologies.
Tom Wagner, program manager for Earth Sciences in the
Office of Polar Program (OPP) at the National Science
Foundation (NSF), says IPY could not have come at a more
opportune time.
“At this time in the world, anything that we can
do that shows cooperation of people across national boundaries
is critical,” explains Wagner, who also serves as
the current science representative at McMurdo Station.
“The IGY had that spirit in 1957,” he adds,
“and we have really rekindled that spirit in 2007,
and all of the projects we’re supporting have major
international components to them.”
IPY also comes at a critical juncture as the world wrestles
with the challenges of global warming, according to Andrew
Fountain, a member of the U.S. IPY National Committee,
which represents the country in discussions with the international
community of scientists on IPY projects.
“This is coming at an excellent time in the context
of the whole global climate change discussion,” says
Fountain, an NSF grantee who works on the McMurdo Dry
Valleys Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) project.
“The polar regions are becoming a highlight within
that, and that’s a very good thing.”
Putting it together
Discussions among the international polar science community
began in 2002 when The National Academies’ Polar
Research Board (PRB), which doubles as the U.S. IPY National
Committee, brought together a group of scientists to determine
whether the IPY would be effective.
“We walked away [from that meeting] fairly convinced
that it was a powerful thing to do, that our planet was
changing and there were frontiers still impossible to
reach [as] individual nations,” says Robin Bell,
who has been at the forefront of U.S. IPY efforts and
chairs the PRB.
“The only way to address the change at the frontiers
was for nations to work together,” says Bell, one
of the principal investigators on an IPY project to explore
Antarctica’s Gamburtsev Province, home to a mysterious
subglacial mountain range.
Those five years of planning passed quickly as the effort
eventually involved more than 60 countries, hundreds of
proposals and thousands of scientists. “It’s
a combination of grass roots and getting buy-in from the
international committee,” Bell says.
The national committee, while it set the stage for IPY,
has no funding authority. The job to evaluate proposals
and hand out U.S. grants falls to NSF and the OPP.
OPP carved out $10 million from existing core programs
in 2006 to kick-start the effort, and NSF at large contributed
an additional $5.35 million, according to budget statements
on the agency’s Web site.
“It really convinced people that the agency was
serious about doing new things in IPY, and they responded
well by developing internationally cooperative projects
that went well beyond the scope of the kind of international
projects that we had seen proposed before,” notes
Antarctic Sciences Division Director Scott Borg.
The following fiscal year, NSF and OPP committed to about
$61.5 million, more than $47 million from OPP alone. About
$30 million of that amount was entirely new funds, according
to Borg.
“That committed NSF to a fairly large amount of
money, and that allowed us to fund a lot of what we believe
is going to be good science,” he says.
Good science
While the central theme of the IPY involves studying the
polar regions in the context of climate change, the effort
ranges across most disciplines and explores a number of
scientific questions and themes.
John Priscu leads a science team that studies microbial
diversity in the permanently ice-covered lakes in the
McMurdo Dry Valleys as part of the McMurdo LTER. He and
a number of colleagues will work into April, a couple
of months after most people in the United States Antarctic
Program (USAP) have left for home.
The scientists want to understand what happens to the
organisms in the lakes as the light fades and the temperatures
drop. Currently, the researchers can only hypothesize
about what occurs during the eight months of the year
when they’re not present.
The IPY offers an opportunity to fill in an incomplete
picture of carbon production and use in the lakes, among
other things, according to Priscu.
“I have been pushing since the ’80s to sample
these lakes year-round,” he says.
Another IPY program that has many people in the USAP
excited is POLENET, an ambitious project to create a network
of GPS and seismic sensor sites around West Antarctica
and the Transantarctic Mountains.
Led by Terry Wilson, with the Byrd Polar Research Center
at Ohio State University, POLENET will help calculate
the mass of the ice sheet. That will help scientists predict
more accurately sea level changes as ice mass decreases.
The list of such sweeping science goals goes on. Bell’s
project in Antarctica’s Gamburtsev Province, dubbed
AGAP, includes several countries including China. It will
survey one of the least-understood parts of the continent,
and determine what role its subglacial mountain range
may play in ice sheet formation.
“They’re basic discovery kinds of projects
in central East Antarctica, which, so far, has had very
scarce data collected to characterize the ice sheet and
underlying lithosphere,” Borg says. (A complete list
of the NSF-funded IPY projects can be found at the agency’s
Web site.)
IPY leads to accelerated level of discovery
The most obvious payoff from the IPY will be the streams
of new data that scientists will collect. “That will
be mined for many, many years to come,” Borg notes.
Without this intensified focus, he says, it might have
taken more than a decade to accomplish some of the goals
that international teams will complete in just a few years.
“They might not ever have been produced … if
we hadn’t sent a real strong signal to the community
that we wanted to see a much higher level of international
collaboration,” Borg says.
While the IPY has hardly begun, it’s not too early
to start talking about legacies and what may come after,
according to Fountain.
“People are already starting to think of post-IPY
efforts because … by the time you gear up for post-IPY,
it is post-IPY, and you don’t want to lose momentum
in what’s being built,” he says.
IPY may have set in motion a new paradigm that encourages
international collaboration and more big-picture, thinking-outside-the-box
science.
“There’s certainly the opportunity to maintain
the higher level of international collaboration, but it
depends on the proposals,” Borg says.
No one can predict whether funds will be available beyond
IPY for the sort of ambitious projects now under way.
However, the scientists say they hope the international
bonds that they forge will last similar to those made
in the IGY.
“That generation bonded,” Priscu says. “It
just set a new precedence for polar research.”
Sharing the cost
Collaboration isn’t only about fostering goodwill.
It’s not cheap to work in Antarctica, given that
it requires an operation that moves hundreds of people
and countless tons of supplies around the world and back
again.
“Science is getting to the point where it’s
getting more and more expensive,” Priscu says. “You
have to collaborate, and you have to collaborate internationally.”
The $30 million ANtarctic geological DRILLing (ANDRILL)
project has ambitions beyond this year’s second straight
field season. ANDRILL scientists have targeted several
additional sites where they want to drill into the seafloor
to extract sediments that will tell them more about the
continent’s geological and glacial past.
An effort between four nations, ANDRILL may not have
existed without international cooperation.
“We’re actively seeking the involvement of
any other polar nation, any other Antarctic Treaty nation,
that would like to buy into this effort and get a piece
of the science that’s coming down the way later,”
says David Harwood, ANDRILL principal investigator who
is at McMurdo Station this season overseeing the research
as the co-chief scientist.
“It’s in the spirit of the Antarctic Treaty,
certainly in the spirit of the International Polar Year,
and it’s an expensive operation,” he adds. “Probably
no single nation could do this effort, so the more folks
that are involved, the more ability we’ll have to
meet all the science goals and answer the questions we
have as a community.”
Spreading the word
Public awareness about the Antarctic and Arctic is an
important goal for several reasons, not the least of which
is helping people connect the dots between the poles,
climate change and their own lives.
These regions at the end of the Earth are intimately connected
with those of us who live in the temperate [regions],”
Wagner says. “The IPY is going to put that right in
the foreground.”
Several dozen projects focus on just education and outreach.
These two years may produce more documentaries, news stories
and photographs of the poles than the last two decades.
And many project teams now include teachers, who post
blogs of their adventures for students back home and develop
lesson plans based on their experiences.
ANDRILL alone has invited a dozen educators to the Ice
from its four member nations during the last two seasons.
For Harwood, these 24 months represent an opportunity
to encourage and inspire the next generation of polar
researchers.
“[We’re] trying to increase science literacy
regarding polar issues into the schools because the youth
that are participating in the activities and being aware
of what we’re doing in polar research — those
kids are going to be the ones that are going to be repairing
the problems that we have given to them.”
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Antarctic
Sun
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