Several traverses across Antarctica are occurring this season, studying the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. They all have very informative and helpful web pages, as well as daily or weekly updates about their progress. Previous Expeditions: More information on previous International Antarctic Traverses can be found on the following pages: Summary of International Trans-Antarctic Scientific Expeditions (ITASE) Previous scientific traverses across East Antarctica almost fifty years ago Current Expeditions: ...

IPY is possibly the largest and most interdisciplinary science project ever conducted. Tens of thousands of investigators from dozens of countries are collecting data in diverse disciplines in physical, life, and social sciences. The data management challenge presented by IPY is huge. The current approach to the challenge is through an informal global partnership of data centers, archives, and networks working to ensure proper stewardship of IPY and related data. This partnership is called the IPY Data and Information Service (IPYDIS) and a new web site, discussion forum, and help desk has been established at http://ipydis.org to help coordinate the effort. The IPYDIS seeks to actively engage and support the IPY community, as such, advice, critique, and suppo...

He recalls that his passion for the extreme probably began when he first saw the snow, during a school holiday at New Zealand's Tongariro National Park, at the age of sixteen. He was a young teenager living in the countryside and he had never seen the magic of snow. Since that day, Sir Edmund Hillary has spent a great deal of his life amid snow and ice, blizzards and storms, high snowy peaks close to the sky and turbulent rivers flowing down to the sea. In May 1953 he was the first to reach the summit of Mt Everest – with Tenzing Norgay. Thanks to that success another great adventure would keep him close to snow and ice for almost two years: the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition (TAE), a joint-venture between Great Britain and New Zealand that aimed to cross Antarc...

Very few places on Earth are lucky enough to be nicknamed "Gateway to Antarctica". They can be counted on the fingers of one hand: Hobart in Tasmania; Ushuaia in Argentina; Punta Arenas, overlooking the Straight of Magellan in Chile; Cape Town in South Africa and of course Christchurch, in New Zealand. It is from these locations that intrepid explorers and navigators have set sail to the Great Unknown, in search of the Terra australis incognita and beyond, to the magnetic South Pole and to the geographical South Pole. In those times there were no satellite images to tell you how the path would look like. In Antarctica, no native people could give clues to the explorers, nor help them with their own experience of survival, as with the Eskimos in the Arctic. Among these few...

Submitted by Cristina Millan on October 20, at 2am: I already said this year's location was beautiful but at night... there are no words to describe it. All photos below are from different days and different times throughout the night. Pretty soon we will not have this colors anymore, but for now... we have this! And there are no camera tricks! I took this photo of Mt Discovery (one of the many volcanoes nearby) a few nights ago, around 2 in the morning. It was bitterly cold but we all bundle up and went out for the show: Mt Erebus at 4:00 am two days ago. Early dawn: ...

By Dr. Frank-Oliver Nitsche, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University The Amundsen Sea continental shelf is one of the remotest areas of coastal Antarctica, and was relatively unexplored until the late 1980s. Over the last two decades, increased oceanographic and geological interest has led to several cruises that resulted in sufficient bathymetric data to compile a fairly detailed regional map of the Amundsen continental shelf. We have combined available multibeam and singlebeam bathymetry data from various sources and created a new regional bathymetry of the Amundsen Sea continental shelf and margin. Deep trough systems that dominate the inner shelf are aligned with present glaciers and separated by shallower ridges. Shaped by paleo-ice streams, these featur...

On October 22, science students from around Chile congregated in Punta Arenas for the start of the the IV Feria Antártica Escolar (Antarctic Students' Fair), which this year focuses on the effects of climate change on the wildlife of Antarctica. FAE was inaugurated by Dr. Juan Carlos Castilla, who spoke about "Climate Change in Chile: how can we adapt and help mitigate its impact". Castilla is professor at the Catholic University of Chile, a specialist in experimental marine ecology and marine conservation. Castilla is a member of the Chilean Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences (US). In this FAE, six experimental works and 18 bibliographical ones will be presented by students, with topics covering places like Eastern Island and Puert...

Janneke de Vries writes: The Forum on Biological Prospecting has been established and a call for submissions has been posted on the forum. Thanks to the colleagues who responded already to take part in the ICG. The work will be conducted in accordance with the following time table: 30 November 2007: Deadline for submissions on the web forum; 31 December 2007: Circulation of draft report of the ICG to the participants in the ICG; 28 February 2008: Deadline for comments on the web forum on the draft report of the ICG; 31 March 2008: Submission of report of the ICG to the ...

The Smithsonian Institution announces the release of the Proceedings of the 2007 International Polar Diving Workshop. With major support from the National Science Foundation, Smithsonian Institution, NERC Facility for Scientific Diving, and Diving Unlimited International an interdisciplinary, international polar scientific diving workshop took place at the Artctic Marine Laboratory in Ny-Alesund, Svalbard, March 15-21, 2007. Twenty-eight participants from around the world discussed scientific, physiological and operational considerations of working under ice using scuba in polar environments. Sixteen papers, edited discussion sessions and consensus recommendations are presented in this volume, an IPY contribution from the international polar scientific diving community....

"Never give up your dreams". Jean-Louis Etienne — the French doctor and explorer — knows more than anyone what these words mean; for four years he has been involved with the Total Pole Airship project, which aims to fly a blimp over the Arctic ocean and the North Pole, measuring the thickness of the sea ice with an instrument designed by the Alfred-Wegener Institute. Last Friday, October 12, Jean-Louis Etienne could finally smile. The expedition blimp was inaugurated during a ceremony in Marseille — it was christened Total Pole Airship, after the sponsor Total. The blimp arrived in France from Russia (whe...