Yet another recent study points to the Arctic being anomalously warmer than it should be, thanks to man-made greenhouse gas emissions. A research team led by Dr. Darrell Kaufman of Northern Arizona University has recently had a holistic look at data sets taken from tree rings, lake sediment cores and ice cores going back 2,000 years and reached a conclusion that while somewhat expected, nonetheless still gives you pause.

On September 2 2009, the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names (U.S. Board on Geographic Names) confirmed a place name in Antarctica for the first black explorer who set foot on the Frozen Continent.

My research focuses on how the Sami were represented in text and images in four natural scientists’ travel- and scientific journals and letter correspondence during the nineteenth century. The scientists are Goran Wahlenberg (1780-1851), Lars Levi Laestadius (1800-1861), Sven Loven (1809-1895) and Axel Hamberg (1863-1933).

On SciencePoles, the scientific website of the International Polar Foundation, Polar View Project Manage Thomas Puestow of C-CORE talks about how the conglomerate of earth observation service providers he has been heading since it began in 2003 has emerged as a key player in meeting user needs during International Polar Year and beyond.

Frank Wild had more Antarctic experience than anyone else during the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration (1895-1922), participating in five expeditions between 1901 and 1922.

Google has just announced that they have begun making the entire 10-million photo archive of LIFE magazine available on their servers. To access the images just do an image search for a topic, adding "source:life" to your search query. Searching for "antarctica source:life" or "arctic source:life" serves up some stunning photography, most of it never published before. Here is just a small sampler:...

University of Alaska Fairbanks glaciologist Matt Nolan has just completed the second phase of an extensive study of McCall Glacier in northern Alaska, briefly returning to civilization after over two months on the glacier with heaps of ice cores and measurements of glacier dynamics, but also with some great panoramic photos, timelapse photography, and videos of his young son Turner skiing for the first time. Matt’s daily documenting of what scientists (and his family) get up to on an glacier expedition has now been posted to IPY.org, with many new panoramas and video. You can read all of Matt’s entries, in reverse chronological order, but below are just some of the highlights: ...

From April to September 2008, University of Alaska Fairbanks researcher Matt Nolan is living on McCall Glacier in Northern Alaska with his wife, son and fellow researchers, subjecting the glacier to a battery of tests... and blogging the process. Because McCall Glacier is so remote, he’s only able to send his blog entries by plane every few weeks or so. We’ve just received — and posted — the most recent batch. You can access all of Matt’s posts via this link. What makes Matt’s posts so interesting is that he uses an assortment of multimedia tools to get his message across. Not “just” text and photos, but also video (posted to YouTube and embedded here on IPY.org)...

There is no way one web site can report on all IPY activities around the world. That's why we started Friends of IPY, a list of regularly updated news and blog sites dealing with the poles and IPY-related activities. You can see the most recently published stories from all these sites on the right hand side column of the front page of IPY.org. This makes it easy to keep up to date on all things polar. With the recent addition of the Students on Ice Blog to "Friends of IPY", a list of regularly updated news and blog sites dealing with the po...