One of the tasks of the endorsed project "Enhancing the environmental legacy of the IPY in Antarctica" is to look at the cumulative environmental impacts of the IPY. So far, the IPY Joint Committee has endorsed 99 projects with Antarctic or bipolar focus. These projects encompass at least 350 research activities, of which 82% plan to conduct fieldwork in Antarctica. Of these activities, 105 (37%) are planning to leave behind physical infrastructure. A large amount of activity has been planned around existing centers of research (e.g., the Antarctic Peninsula, Dronning Maud Land); a number of large-scale research activities has also been planned in areas which have, so far, been seldom visited (e.g., the Gamburtsev Mountains, subglacial lakes). Many of them...

Are you looking for green ways to power your instruments in the cold polar regions and not sure what is reliable and would work? Check out PolarPower.org! This website is funded by the United States National Science Foundation and provides a wealth of information for researchers in choosing, designing, implementing, and maintaining remote power systems in polar environments. You can read about power systems that other researchers are currently using. For example, in Antarctica, solar and wind energy are being used at remote field camps in the Dry Valleys and on Mt. Erebus. In Alaska, as well as in Greenland, solar and wind energy are also powering instrumentation 365 days a year. We can all gre...

The IPY is ambitious in scope and in scale. The IPY Programme Office has endorsed 99 projects with Antarctic or bipolar focus for the IPY. These projects encompass at least 350 research activities, of which 82% plan to conduct fieldwork in Antarctica. Of these activities, 105 (37%) activities are planning to leave behind physical infrastructure. To date, only two have completed any environmental impact assessments. The Antarctic Southern Ocean Coalition (ASOC) is conducting a project to enhance the environmental legacy of the IPY through outreach efforts to scientists, tourists and other visitors of Antarctica. We presented a poster on this subject at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, USA in December 2006. Our goal was to ra...