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Update from the Field: International Polar Year

by Kevin Clement, July 2007

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In the last issue of the Zegrahm News I wrote about the advent of the International Polar Year (IPY), a great collaborative, multinational research and education effort inaugurated in March. In April I attended a symposium at the Byrd Polar Research Center addressing the past, present, and future of the IPY.

So far, there are 228 registered IPY projects, involving about 70 countries and some 50,000 scientists, field staff, and support personnel. Many of these projects are already underway. Each is designed to answer questions that have puzzled researchers and confounded policymakers. The answers, and the actions we take based on them, will ultimately affect our collective lives.

Some of the most interesting questions concern the High Arctic region we'll be exploring on Zegrahm's journey to Greenland and Ellesmere Island next year. For example:

Recently the world's fastest-moving glacier has doubled its speed. Why?

The acceleration of the Jacobshavn, as well as other glaciers of southern Greenland, would seem to contradict global warming. However, satellite measurements suggest that the glaciers are also thinning and discharging more ice into the ocean, reducing the mass of the ice cap and raising global sea levels. IPY projects like MARGINS (Measurement and Attribution of Recent Greenland Ice Sheet Changes) and GLIMPSE (Greenland Ice Margins - Prediction, Stability and Evolution) will attempt to find out what's happening and why.

With sea ice diminishing and its habitat shrinking, what will become of the polar bear?

There are disturbing signs that polar bears around the world are struggling, and in the U.S. they are now being considered for threatened status under the Endangered Species Act. But it has been 15 years since the last circum-Arctic assessment of the bears' health, numbers, and movements. A project headed by Denmark's Environmental Research Institute with partners from four other nations is investigating how much danger the bears are in, and from what sources.

Are the indigenous people of the Arctic feeling the effects of climate change?

Award-winning author and polar expert Gretel Ehrlich is now on an IPY expedition sponsored by National Geographic to collect native elders' perceptions of their changing environment. She quotes traditional hunter Otto Simigaq of Siormalik: "Seven years ago we could travel on safe ice all winter and get animals. We didn't worry about food then. Now it's different. The seas are very rough now and it's dangerous. We always went to the ice edge west of Kiatak Island. Lots of walrus out there. But the ice doesn't go that far out now. The ice edge moves closer each year. The walrus are still there, but we can't get to them." This is one of many stories that natives, beset by disastrous changes in sea ice and tundra, have told her.

The International Polar Year is an exciting time for science, an interesting time to be alive and engaged, and a great time to join a polar expedition. Welcome to it.

Kevin Clement, a director of Zegrahm Expeditions, will give presentations and updates on IPY on our Arctic and Antarctic voyages in 2007 and 2008.

For more information, visit these websites:

www.ipy.org and www.us-ipy.gov