The light is returning to the Arctic and starting to fade from Antarctica, and APECS members have been very busy! As always, we would love to hear about local meetings, opportunities, activities, and developments. Please send any items or information for the next newsletter to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it by the 28th of February to be included in the next Newsletter. This newsletter can also be viewed on the APECS website at http://arcticportal.org/apecs/apecs-news. 1. APECS Meeting at AGU Ocean Sciences 2. SCAR/IASC St Petersburg Conference July 8 to 11, 2008 3. International Glaciological Society supports APECS Early Career Researchers 4. IP...

The Legacy of IPY must be a Circumpolar Arctic Park conserving Biodiversity, Habitats, People, Ecological Processes and Services for Global Sustainability Falk Huettmann PhD, Assistant Professor EWHALE lab, Institute of Arctic Biology, Biology & Wildlife Department, University of Alaska-Fairbanks, Fairbanks AK 99775 USA, Email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it Phone 907 474 7882 IPY is a massive global research project that wants to provide huge progress, a quantum leap. However, looking at the sophisticated honey comb project scheme showing that all projects are connected, it gets obvious that SUSTAINABILITY and Biodiversity were actually left out in the major...

Submitted February 13, 2008: Now that we are in the open waters of the Inner Ross Sea, the sampling program can start in earnest. In the typical style of all marine surveys, some of the gear gave us problems on the first deployment but once teething problems were sorted everything worked as we wanted. As expected, the weather has already had an impact. From a relatively calm sea we suddenly expe...

Drawing South is a website documenting the visual communication of artist Nicholas Hutcheson from on board the ship Aurora Australis as it visits 3 of the Australian bases on one of the annual re-supply trips. Nicholas will be heading to the Antarctic as part of the Australian Governments Antarctic Arts fellowship progam. Each week of the 8 week voyage, a new set of drawings will be uploaded featuring the weather, interviews with people working in the Antartic, answers to viewers questions and the daily observations of things around him. Part of this project is working with school students who are following the journey, asking him questions and learning about Ant...

Drawing South is a website documenting the visual communication of artist Nicholas Hutcheson from on board the ship Aurora Australis as it visits 3 of the Australian bases on one of the annual re-supply trips. Nicholas will be heading to the Antarctic as part of the Australian Governments Antarctic Arts fellowship progam. Each week of the 8 week voyage, a new set of drawings will be uploaded featuring the weather, interviews with people working in the Antartic, answers to viewers questions and the daily observations of things around him. Part of this project is working with school students who are following the journey, asking him questions and learning about Ant...

The Last Polar Bear records and celebrates one of nature’s most majestic creatures — the polar bear — and examines how global warming is affecting the fragile, complex Arctic environment. Polar bears use sea ice to move about, find mates and hunt for seals. As temperatures warm, the loss of the pack ice directly impacts their ability to survive. Scientists agree that Arctic ice is disappearing at an alarming rate. Last summer, sea ice levels plummeted to their lowest since satellite measurements began in 1979. And a new scientific study by the U.S. Geological Survey, released last fall, predicts that two-thirds of the world’s polar bears, including Alaska’s entire population, may disapp...

Contents: 1. IPY Science Day: Changing Earth, March 12th 2008 2. Send us your stories! 3. St Petersburg SCAR/IASC Meeting, July 2008 4. End of IPY Celebrations 5. Workshop and summer school opportunities for students 6. The Legacies of IPY Report no. 10, February 2008 From: IPY International Programme Office To: IPY Project Coordinators cc: IPY Community Google Groups 1. IPY Science Day: Changing Earth, March 12th 2008 The IPY Science Day on March 12th will focus on change over geological time, especially the glacial and interglacial periods that have occurred during the past million years, and cycles of ocean- atmosphere interactions that give rise to r...

6th February 2008 Last week was a blowout when it came to using the twin otters — until Thursday. Then we split into three teams. Two teams managed to get a seismic site and two GPS sites in on Thursday while Abel, Mitch and I went north on a helicopter to do a tie on Brimstone Peak on Friday night. As a night flight things got a bit colder and we were dodging low clouds all the way up through Victoria Land, passing flights of raised beaches on the way. We landed in a swirl of cloud and snow on the south side of Brimstone, and lugged our gear over to the tie. The tie will mean that old data from a ...

In our previous post we wrote that we’d enter the Agulhas Current, a western boundary current, about 4 hours out of Durban. Here are some interesting facts about western boundary currents, and the Agulhas in particular: They originate from equatorial waters flowing westward in response to easterly winds. Where westerly equatorial flow meets a continental shelf, the equatorial current turns and becomes a western boundary current, earning its name. In the Northern Hemisphere, they veer right, flowing north; in the Southern Hemisphere, they veer left, flowing south. Along the western edges of ocean basins, they move warm water from equatorial latitudes toward the poles. Their warm-water transport mitigates, to some extent, the incoming solar energy difference ...

February 3, 2008: After a couple of days in South Africa, we’re adjusting to our new time zone. All participants are here now, and we’re setting up our shipboard labs. The vessel has 4,000 square feet of lab space shared among several projects. View the ship’s webcam. Our thoughts are focused on our teamwork, and we are practicing our CTD (conductivity, temperature, and depth) operation, which involves deploying and retrieving a large array of water collection bottles mounted on a room-size framework. The sample bottles are set up to open at a specified depth. We’ll have to be prepared to do this under harsh conditions. A front is...