Polar Heritage - once lost, it can never be regained. Protection and preservation of early scientific bases in polar regions. A multidisciplinary and international conference with presentations focussed on technical and administrative issues associated with the protection and preservation of historic scientific bases and in "Historic polar resources are disappearing! Once lost, it can never be regained. Protection and preservation of early scientific bases in polar regions. The age of discovery in polar regions also brought scientific research and soon the first non-indigenous structures were built. Regretably some of these historic sites have already been lost and more are under threat. The International Polar Heritage Committee IPY conference in Barrow Alaska, the site of one the first IPY scientific stations will assemble organisations and individuals working to protect these sites so they can share their expertise and experience to preserve them. "

Northern High Latitude Climate variability during the past 2000 years:implications for human settlement. "NORCLIM investigates how natural climate change over the past two millenia has affected human presence in the Arctic. Examples are the timing of Viking settlement on the Faroer, Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland and the shift in whaling activities from Spitsbergen to Davis Strait during the Little Ice Age. To achieve the NORCLIM goals, geologists, climatologists and archeologists from seven counties will carry out marine and terrestrial fieldwork on key locations along a Newfoundland-Spitsbergen transect.

Understanding the state of the cryosphere, and its associated past, present and future variability, is essential to understanding physical and biogeochemical interactions between the oceanic, atmospheric, terrestrial, social, cultural, and economic systems. This project will provide a framework for assessing the state of cryosphere. It will establish links with IPY projects involved in monitoring, assessing, and understanding the global cryosphere, and with projects involved in socioeconomic and cultural issues.

The Impacts of Oil and Gas Activity on Peoples in the Arctic Using a Multiple Securities Perspective From 2007-2010 a broad-based group of students and researchers from diverse backgrounds (political science to ecology) will take a human security approach to studying how oil and gas development will affect Arctic communities in Norway, Russia and Canada. By making human security central, we expect to connect Arctic peoples, researchers and policy makers in ways that will result in genuine listening and interaction among the groups.

Extending IPY Themes to the Undergraduate Earth System Science Education Community "The NASA/USRA Earth System Science Education for the 21st Century program (ESSE 21) engages interdisciplinary college and university teams to develop courses, curricula and degree programs that consider air, water, land and life processes on Earth. IPY research on polar processes will enrich ESSE 21 learning materials with relevant and compelling content that explores the global impact of polar science. "

ArcticWOLVES is an international initiative developed for the International Polar Year (IPY) 2007-2008. The project will build a network of circumpolar wildlife observatories in order to assess the current state of arctic terrestrial food webs over a large geographical range. The network will provide baseline information to evaluate current and future population trends for a large number of species at several locations using standard protocols. Another aim of the project is to determine the relative importance of bottom-up (resources) and top-down (predators) forces in structuring arctic food webs, and how climate affects these trophic linkages.

The eight arctic countries have been working together to evaluate the source and impacts on humans and the environment of contaminants (eg. PCBs, DDT, mercury etc.) since the early 1990s. Several reports released by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP) have documented the distant sources of these contaminants and outlined the human and evironmental concerns. This meeting in Arctic Canada during the fall of 2008 will outline the state of knowldege on the human health concerns related to these enviromental contaminants.

The Kinnvika project will re-open an old research station from the previous polar year to study Arctic Warming and Impact Research. The spectrum of projects from geosciences to the humanities, investigates how the environmental and anthropogenic dynamics have changed recently in comparison with past records of change from existing expedition logs and photographs, proxy climate data from ice-, lake- and sea-sediment cores, and dynamic studies both on terrestrial as marine ice. This is a major multi-national multi-disciplined project involving 26 working groups and more than 80 Principal Investigators.

CAML will investigate the distribution and abundance of Antarctic marine biodiversity, how it will be affected by climate change and how climate change will affect the ecosystem and the planet. Its key focus is a major ship based research programme in the austral summer of 2007-2008. Scientists from 30 countries and 50 institutions will collate data providing a robust benchmark against which future change can be measured.

The voyages of discovery in the second half of the 16th century and later, during the so called Heroic Century of Polar Exploration (1870-1920), including the first International Polar Year (1882-1883), made it possible for the western colonial powers to penetrate into the polar areas. The voyages of discovery not only led to scientific research but also the exploitation of natural resources. Until now, the history of polar science and exploitation of polar areas were almost exclusively studied from a regional and national approach based on written sources from the archives in the countries in the core region. The aim of this project is to study the various (hunting, whaling, mining and research) settlements/stations in their natural settings from a bipolar, international and comparative perspective. The project will give an overview of the development of science and natural resource exploitation and its impact on the natural environment and the indigenous peoples.