By Dr. Manish Tiwari Scientist, National Centre For Antarctic & Ocean Research, Goa, India As the IPY completes one year successfully, India has contributed strongly to its scientific & outreach program that will continue into 2008-09 & beyond. National Centre for Antarctic & Ocean Research (NCAOR, under the Ministry of Earth Sciences, Govt. of India) is acting as the national coordinating agency and has well defined outreach activities that seek to educate school children, general public & scientific community about the challenges & need of the polar research. Towards this, NCAOR has contributed & participated in exhibitions to celebrate IPY. It has also put effort in getting published many articles outlining the activities under IPY themes in Indian scientific journ...

Hi, everyone. My name is Nancy Etchemendy, and I am a professional writer. Most of my work is for children and teens. On May 26, 2008, I will step out of the cozy room where I usually spin my tales, and will head south for the first of two month-long Antarctic voyages aboard the National Science Foundation's icebreaker Nathaniel B. Palmer. We will be researching the complex ways in which the icebergs that have recently broken off of the ice shelves are affecting the environment around them. Eventually, I will write at least one K-12 book about the project. But before, during, and immediately after the voyages, I will be posting to two blogs, intended to provide engaging, informative, interactive reading for different age groups, and classroom opportunities and science fact...

IPY Day Flyers with Classroom Activities (PDFs):
IPY Launch
Sea Ice
Ice Sheet
Changing Earth
Land and Life
People
Above the Poles

Polar Oceans

October 2009 Polar Week

March 2010 Polar Week

All flyers for the above Polar Days and Week are available in other languages on the International Polar Day pages.

Icy IPY Activities
Here are some of our favourite activities, as Word documents, that you can download and try in your classroom. Please let us know what you think of them!

Many thanks to Louise Huffman (LH) and Sandy Zicus( SZ) for sharing their activities with us. Please also send any other favourites that you have to Nicola Munro, email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .


Blubber Gloves; Fat Birds-Skinny Birds(LH)
Sediment Tubes (LH)
Polar Animal Adaptation (LH)
Penguin Family Reunion (LH)
Explorers Fuel - Gorp (LH)
Detecting CO2 (SZ)
Coriolis Activity (SZ)
Comparing the Arctic and Antarctic (SZ)
Climate Activities (SZ)

I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Ice Cream!; explore the properties of water and ice by making your own ice cream!

Experiments with Snow and Ice; simple experiments investigating the properties of snow, ice, and water, melting and freezing.

Ice in the Solar System; in-depth inquiry-based activities based on the physical properties of ice and water.

Compare your School with an Arctic School; a fun inquiry project comparing the students school/town with those in the arctic.

Previous International Polar Days have focussed on Sea Ice, Ice Sheets, our Changing Earth, and Land and Life. The IPY Day on September 24th will focus on People. Back to main People Pages ...

ANTARCTIC CLIMATE & ECOSYSTEMS COOPERATIVE RESEARCH CENTRE Media Release embargoed until 10:00 am 17 April 2008 Polar Year expedition returns with evidence of ocean change The Aurora Australis returns to Hobart this morning, after completing a major oceanographic expedition across the Southern Ocean. The Climate of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean (CASO) voyage obtained the most accurate and complete measurements of the ocean currents between Australia and Antarctica yet taken, providing important information that will improve models used to predict climate change. “We have collected a remarkable data set of observations from the Southern Ocean, covering a wide range of physical, chemical and bio...

PRESS RELEASE Alfred-Wegener-Institut for Polar- und Meeresforschung in der Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft Institute for Polar and Marine Research Communications Dept. Postfach 12 01 61, 27515 Bremerhaven/Germany Tel. ++49 471 4831-2008, Fax ++49 471 4831-1389 email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it Methane sources over the last 30,000 years New insights into natural changes in atmospheric methane concentrations Bremerhaven, April 17, 2008. Ice cores are essential for climate research, because they represent the only archive which allows direct measurements of atmospheric composition and greenhouse gas concentrations in the past. Using novel isotopic studies, scientists from the European Project for Ice Coring In Antarctica (EPICA) w...

By Jan Strugnell, British Antarctic Survey The last few days we have been searching for suitable coring sitesand coring for the geologists for the BAS CACHE-PEP-G program. This focus of this program is to investigate the last 10, 000 years of Earth history and specifically how the Antarctic climate has interacted with the global climate. The program uses ice cores, lake sediments and marine sediments to build up this picture. Photo: Corethron criophilum, a diatom. On this cruise, the geologists are trying to find marine sediments that have built up over the last 10,000 years. Marine sediments are b...

By Jan Strugnell, British Antarctic Survey Although the majority of the trawling is now completed for the biologists on board, the work has not stopped! There is still plenty of activity in the laboratories and computer rooms to process all of the samples. Steffi, Dave and Adrian have been spending a lot of time looking down their microscopes sorting the animals that were caught in the Epibenthic sledge (EBS). The animals caught in the EBS typically range in size from 7 mm to 70 cm, although it must be said that some of the largest animals we caught were also captured in the EBS, including a sea cucumber at least 50 cm long! We are lucky that we have a number of taxonomic experts on board to sort the animals. We have experts on polychaetes (Adri...

By Jan Strugnell, British Antarctic Survey Tonight we did some trawling on one of the Marie Byrd sea mounts in an attempt to sample some corals for the geologists on board. The geologists were hoping to collect some corals to look at past carbon dioxide levels held within the coral structure. Deep sea corals had been previously discovered in the Amundsen sea region and initial analyses of them showed that some of them were alive during the last ice age! (between 12,000-24,000 years ago). The biologists were also interested in any other fauna that we could collect from there as very little is known about sea mount biology and so anything we would collect would be of interest. Trawling in potentially rocky conditions at depth is greatly increases ...

By Jan Strugnell, British Antarctic Survey I am a molecular phylogeneticist at Cambridge University (funded by a Lloyd’s Tercentenary Foundation Fellowship) and I am investigating the molecular evolutionary history of Antarctic and deep sea octopus. I am therefore on board to sample any octopus we catch in our trawls for later DNA sequencing and also to preserve them for later investigation and identification. Specifically I am using octopus as model organisms to test the hypothesis that the Antarctic has acted as a centre for evolutionary innovation and radiation and as a source of taxa that have invaded the deep sea. I am also interested in investigating how past glaciation in Antarctica has effected octopus speciation, and also at the effect of the Antarctic Circumpolar...