When asked about this IPY Day, sea ice scientist, Don Perovich (IPY project 95), replied: September 21 is excellent timing for a sea ice day. There is a tremendous amount of sea ice activity going on. There was an international sea ice summer school with more than 100 students from dozens of countries in July. There is currently a tremendous amount of sea ice activity going on in IPY. This summer there have been icebreakers from Canada, Sweden, Russia, and the U.S. conducting research in the Arctic and deploying autonomous sensors to monitor the changing sea ice cover. There have been ice camps at the North Pole and in the Beaufort Sea, along with work out of terrestrial...

How does ice floating on the ocean act as it melts? Download this activity as a PDF: What Happens When Sea Ice Melts How does ice floating on the ocean act as it melts? Main photo: Salt water on left and fresh on right Materials per pair of students: 2-2 oz. blue ice cubes (In a small plastic cup, freeze 2 ozs of water mixed with 6 drops of blue food coloring) 2-16 ounce clear cups (Fill one with tap water and one with tap water saturated with salt) Directions: 1. Draw two glasses on a piece of paper. 2. Label one “fresh water” and the other “salt water.” 3. Draw a predict...

Activity time: 20-30 minutes + freezing time PDF version, with pictures, to download: Sea ice and circulation activity.pdf BACKGROUND: The freezing temperature of water depends on the amount of dissolved salts (salinity). Normal ocean water, with a salinity of about 3.4%, begins to freeze when temperatures reach about -1.9°C. At its maximum extent in the winter, sea ice covers about 19 million square kilometres of the Southern Ocean near Antarctica. Approximately 80% of this ice melts each summer, contributing to the global mixing of ocean water. Vertical mixing of ocean water, known as ‘overturning circulation’ or ‘thermohaline...

Mark your diaries: SEPTEMBER 21ST WILL BE THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL POLAR DAY, HIGHLIGHTING SEA ICE. IPY and Sea Ice Over 30 large, international IPY projects are studying some aspect of Sea Ice. This includes ship expeditions, remote sensing, sea ice ecosystems, the importance of sea ice to polar bears and marine mammals, climate research, exhibitions, and books. On September 13th, a web-page dedicated to Sea Ice will be published on www.ipy.org listing projects that are involved, real-time expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic, contacts for media, sources for images, and background information. There will also be educational and community activities including classroom...

From the perspective of the North or South Pole, every year is essentially one long day that lasts half a year and one long night lasting the other half. This has enormous impact on how much solar energy is received in different times of year, which in turn influences physical processes, such as the freezing and thawing of snow and ice, biological processes, such as migration, and the lives of people who live in polar regions. If the Earth were perpendicular on its axis, everywhere on the planet would receive an equal amount of sunshine (and darkness) every day. But because of the tilt of the Earth on its axis (currently 23.5 degrees off the perpendicular), only two days a year — the Equinoxes every spring and fall — have equal amounts of sunshine everywhere. ...

We’re still not done. As always the weather has been unfriendly – rain and snow the other day, but now the mountains are quite lovely with their slight dusting of snow. Summer has finished and winter is fast approaching. There’s a nice high pressure over the ice sheet and some nice lows offshore, so although the views are incredible, so are the winds, which are ferocious at the places we want to go. With the 222 helicopter disappearing to Nuuk to get new engines we now have to slot our work timetable into the 212's scheduled visits to the Kulusuk airport to pick up passengers and its scheduled, lifeline visits to outlying communities. If we had the work we think we could be put out in the morning and get picked up in the evening but we cannot really work in that mode ...

Contents: 1) Joint Committee Assessment, for October 2007 2) AGU Sessions and Activities, for December 2007 3) IPY Science Day - 21 September 2007 4) IPY Youth International Planning Workshop, for September 2007 From: IPY International Programme Office To: IPY Project Coordinators cc: IPY Community Google Groups 1) Joint Committee Assessment The IPY Joint Committee will hold their sixth meeting in Canada in late October 2007. With most national funding decisions known, and with most IPY Projects underway or in late stages of planning, the Joint Committee will make an initial assessment of the overall programme. The IPY Expression of Interest (EoI) data...

The site we installed at Koge Bugt was incomplete. The kind of helicopter we used meant that we just couldn’t take all the batteries with us. It's still running on a single battery just now, which won’t do much good with winter fast approaching. We’re going to need a second trip out there to put more batteries in. We started planning to do that over the next couple of days. Because, you know? What could go wrong? In the meantime more people we know had arrived in Angmassalik, and were staying at the Hotel Nansen. The hotel is owned by the same people as the one we’re in (I think) but allows you to cook for yourself. So Abbas was basically press ganged into cooking a curry, with pakora no less, for everyone. Thomas made a Swedish apple pie and I threw together a sala...

Submitted September 2: So its been a long time since I wrote anything, or at least it feels like a long time. To be blunt, not a huge hell of a lot has happened since then. The main feature has been rain, a little more rain and then some more rain, followed by rain and a little bit of wind. We have managed to get another site installed and partially installed a couple of other sites, but weather has not been friendly. I think we last left off on the 23rd of August, something to do with a boat trip to Isertoq if I can remember that far back correctly. That was over a week ago, so what has happened since then? Hmm. We fixed the antenna at the Helheim site, same kind of deal as the last visit to Helheim, crammed into a 212 helicopter this time. The first and only time we've be...

To aid broad interdisciplinary discovery of IPY data, the IPY Data Policy and Management Subcommittee has created an initial metadata profile. A metadata profile is a set of required fields and vocabularies for a given metadata standard. The purpose of the IPY Metadata Profile is to ensure that we capture a bare minimum of information necessary to allow simple discovery across disciplines and to ensure we can track the heritage of the metadata in a broadly distributed data management environment. All IPY data registries and repositories collecting data and metadata from IPY projects are required to collect and share sufficient information to adhere to the IPY Metadata Profile requirements. Similarly, IPY projects are required to submit the compliant metadata t...