By Lucia Simion Far away from traffic jams, polluted cities and rat races, one thousand people are getting ready to live a fantastic adventure on the most remote continent of the world: They are the over-wintering population of Antarctica. Inhabiting some 35 different permanent stations scattered across a continent twice as large as Europe, they will be alone on the ice, where they will experience the polar night, the austral auroras, the blizzards, the solitude and the confinement. They will be more isolated than the astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) as it is very hard to be evacuated from Antarctica during the polar night. One of these stations is Concordia, where the overwintering began on February 1, 2008 for a crew of thirteen people fr...

The first International Polar Science Day focussed on Sea Ice. The second focussed on Ice Sheets, and the third on our Changing Earth. The IPY Day on June 18th will focus on Land and Life. Return to Main Land and Life page The following lists IPY projects that explore the Land and Life at the Polar regions. Their webpages contain a huge amount of information, and the full propos...

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...

This Spring National Geographic Explorer Will Steger and a team of young adventurers will bring their High Arctic dogsled expedition to educators and learners through multimedia dispatches on www.globalwarming101.com. Follow Will and his teammates, all in their early twenties, as they retrace historical expedition routes on Ellesmere Island, encounter endangered wildlife, photograph disintegrating ice sheets that are collapsing into the ocean, mush across frozen sea ice, and visit an area on the frontlines of climate change. Endorsed by the National Education Association, this Adventure Learning project includes standards-linked multidisciplinary lesson plans that explore how climate shape...

This Spring National Geographic Explorer Will Steger and a team of young adventurers will bring their High Arctic dogsled expedition to educators and learners through multimedia dispatches on www.globalwarming101.com. Follow Will and his teammates, all in their early twenties, as they retrace historical expedition routes on Ellesmere Island, encounter endangered wildlife, photograph disintegrating ice sheets that are collapsing into the ocean, mush across frozen sea ice, and visit an area on the frontlines of climate change. Endorsed by the National Education Association, this Adventure Learning project includes standards-linked multidisciplinary lesson plans that explore how climate shape...

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...

The University of the Arctic’s International Polar Year (IPY) Higher Education and Outreach project cluster encompasses a wide variety of IPY-approved projects, and among them is an exciting new college-level science course, “Environmental Radioactivity, Stewardship, and People of the North,” that successfully debuted during Fall Semester 2007 at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF). Development of the course was funded by a U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, “Adapting SENCER to the Arctic—Improving Polar Science Education as a Legacy” (NSF 632397), to Principal Investigator and UAF professor Lawrence K. Duffy. SENCER (Science Education for New Civic Engagement and Responsibilities) is a national movement in U.S. education to reform the teaching of...

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...

This morning, just 62 years ago, Byrd and his Ice Party members, including Yours Truly, sailed up the Bay to the D.C. Navy Yard... So wrote Dr. Alton A. Lindsey to the author on May 10, 1997 — he had turned 90 only three days before. In the early years of the Great Depression, he was at Cornell University studying for his doctorate in biology, when he interrupted this pursuit to serve as the Vertebrate Zoologist on the Byrd Antarctic Expedition II (1933-35). While the interior of the continent was canvassed by dog sled, tractor and airplane, Lindsey studied penguins, seals and other animals on the coast. ...