Following the launch of the International Polar Year (IPY) on the 1st of March, the Northern Hemisphere summer of 2007 will see a flurry of research activity across the Arctic ocean and the Northern circumpolar region.

With around 120 research projects either planned, announced, or already deployed, this massive effort will cover a panoply of disciplines across the Earth, oceanographic, biological, atmospheric, and social sciences. It will involve logistics large and small ranging from powerful icebreakers to dog sledges.

In response to the most pressing questions and challenges of our time, over half of these projects will touch on issues relating to regional and global climate change: reading past climate, predicting future change, and studying the effects of a warming Arctic on indigenous inhabitants and biodiversity.

Ocean

Across the Arctic Ocean, large international projects such as the 16 million Euro European funded DAMOCLES project, and the Integrated Arctic Ocean Observing System (iAOOS) will study the interaction of ocean, sea ice and atmosphere, with particular attention given to Arctic sea ice depletion and fluctuations in the thermohaline circulation. Also under scrutiny will be the marine and climatic exchanges between the Arctic and Antarctic, and their effects on the Earth's climate system as a whole.

These research programmes will use the latest technology ranging from airborne measuring equipment to the deployment of drifting buoys and fixed arrays across highly sensitive regions such as Fram Straight (between Greenland and Svalbard) where they will measure fluctuations in the Gulf Stream with a view to better forecasting future effects on European climate. These will be complemented by state of the art autonomous sea gliders capable of measuring everything from temperature and salinity to sea ice thickness from below.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Polarview consortium will also play a key role in providing satellite data on sea ice cover, thickness and drift, and the satellites themselves will be calibrated with the help of snow cover measurements obtained by field expeditions such as the ongoing Arctic Arc. These measurements and findings will be fed into to future climate models, which themselves will help scientists to better determine the rate and extent of change, when we can expect an ice free Arctic ocean in the summer months, and what this will mean for the Earth's albedo.

Across the Arctic ocean, this vast coordinated enterprise is being supported by the deployment of a veritable international armada of icebreakers amongst which some of the most notable are the German Polarstern, the Sweedish Oden, and the Russian Akademic Federov. These are being complemented by smaller polar vessels and sailing boats such as the French Vagabond and Tara which are both part of  the DAMOCLES consortium.

Greater in number, but often smaller in scale, some dozen ocean related projects will also be studying ecosystem and animal health, researching everything from the health of Arctic bears, seals, whales and belugas, to indicators of mercury levels in sea birds, and Polar microbial ecology. This research will involve wildlife censuses and the tracking of animals, but also the deployment of acoustic and other observatories to detect changes in animal behaviour, and feeding and migration patterns in the face of retreating sea ice and warming temperatures.

In a crossover of the social and natural sciences, one very important project will be researching the issue of fishery ecosystems in the Arctic, whilst another will be studying the age old Inuit tradition of hunting narwhals for tusks.

Ice

Often overlapping with ocean studies (above), especially where it involves sea ice, research into ice processes will span everything from the stability of the Greenland ice sheet, to glacial flow, the collapse of ice shelves, and the retreat of Arctic sea ice.

With the Greenland ice sheet containing some six metre of potential sea level rise, of particular note are projects researching glacial discharge and surface melting in Greenland, and the effect of these processes on the stability of the Greenland ice sheet and sea level rise.

Although perhaps less spectacular in terms of the potential effects of melting, but arguably even more telling as indicators of change, researchers will also look at ice processes across the rest Arctic region, including Alaska, Canada, Svalbard, Norway and the Russian Arctic, with particular attention being paid to the rate of glacial retreat and the growing number of ice shelves that have either already collapsed or have the potential to do so in the near future as the Arctic continues to warm.

Finally, a number of ongoing and crucially important ice related projects will comprise of ice core drilling on the Greenland ice sheet in order to obtain a clearer understanding of Greenland's ice sheet history and response to past Arctic climate variability, but also to compare this Northern paleoclimate data with records obtained in Antarctica, thus composing a clearer picture of past global fluctuations in climate.

Land

Across the territories of the circumpolar Arctic, researchers will be heading North to study and monitor the melting of permafrost as a result of warming, and the widespread consequences for soil, vegetation, wildlife and humans, as well as for the health of the global ecosystem (given that permafrost releases the greenhouse gas methane when it melts).

Assisting researchers in the field, IPY networks such as the International Tundra Experiment (ITEX) will combine data obtained with the aid of aircraft, snow terrain vehicles, existing field stations and newly deployed permafrost observatories. This complex web of field observations and data processing will touch on all aspects of permafrost, including deep permafrost, cold land processes, and the size and vulnerability of carbon pools contained in permafrost. They will also include issues such as the greening of the Arctic, the changing biomass of the region, the northern push of the tree-line, as well as other ongoing changes in terrestrial vegetation.

A large pan-Arctic project known as Arctic WOLVES, will coordinate and set up wildlife observatories at a large number of sites across North America and Eurasia, with the aim to better understand the interactions of a number of key species of herbivores (eg: geese, lemmings, and muskox), insectivores (eg: shorebirds) and predators (eg: foxes, snowy owls, falcons, gulls, and jaegers). Working in parallel, smaller, more targeted biodiversity projects will look at issues such as the biodiversity of Arctic spiders, freshwater biodiversity, and rangifer monitoring - including reindeer herding and human-rangifer migrations in response to change.

Also under close scrutiny will be the hydrological cycle, including such aspects as hydrothermal vent systems, and pan Northern lakes ice cover under present and future climate conditions. One project will seek to deploy a coastal observatory network (ACCO-Net) to look at coastal erosion and variability as a response to melting permafrost.

Finally, in relation to land, a number of projects will look at environmental impacts of change and the management of protected natural areas in Alaska and other circumpolar regions.

Atmosphere

Smaller in number, but also of great importance, a number of meteorological and atmospheric projects will deploy atmospheric observation systems to study and monitor the climate systems of the Arctic, thus giving us a better understanding not just of regional variability, but of the role played by the Arctic on the global scale.

In reverse, these observations will also tell us more about the impact of global emissions and pollutants on the Arctic through individual projects looking at pollution trends and tracers of climate change, the impact of transport to the Arctic, and the Hydrologic impact of aerosols on the region.

People

Last but not least, and for the first time in the history of the IPY, the social sciences have been identified as one of the key areas for IPY research in the Arctic. Social scientists will conduct research looking at everything from the effects of tourism on the Arctic, to the development of oil exploitation, sustainable development, human health, traditional practices, and of course the effects of climate change on Arctic populations, which are among the first on Earth to be directly confronted and threatened by the effects of global warming.

Those studying indigenous peoples and traditional knowledge will focus on a broad kaleidoscope of issues such as reindeer herding and climate change; northern material culture; living conditions in the North; community resiliency to change; adaptation and vulnerability; land right and resources; Northern genealogies; the economies of the North; language literature and media; and issues such as sea ice knowledge and the exchange and protection of traditional knowledge.

Addressing more politically and economically sensitive questions relating to tourism, colonization, and the exploitation of natural resources, social scientists will also embark on host of very topical projects with titles such as 'sustainable development', 'initial colonization', 'relocation and resettlement in the North', 'land and coastal resources', 'impacts of oil and gas activity', and 'people, wilderness and tourism'.

Conclusion

Taken together, this vast Arctic deployment of research activities and its follow-up in the second IPY Arctic season of 2008 will give us a unparalleled interconnected picture of linkages across the Arctic, and a better understanding of past, present and future change in one of the Earth's least documented and monitored regions.

Furthermore, it will provide this understanding at a crucial time in the Arctic's history, when the region is not only undergoing rapid transformation on a local level, but when this transformation is itself starting to significantly impact the Earth system as a whole.

Photos: International Polar Foundation
Text: SciencePoles