Cape Farewell brings artists, scientists and educators together to bring about long-term change in cultural attitudes towards climate change. Created by artist David Buckland in 2001, Cape Farewell has lead three expeditions to the High Arctic, the frontline of climate change. From these expeditions has sprung an extraordinary body of artwork, a film co-produced by the BBC, Cape Farewell’s first major book title, The CD ARCTIC by Max Eastley, educational resources for GCSE Geography and Science and a UN award winning website. The project is widely acknowledged to be the most significant sustained artistic response to climate change anywhere in the world.

Hello! And a happy polar greeting to you all from the gang here at Students on Ice! Thank you to IPY HQ for providing this opportunity for international youth to share their thoughts about the earth's polar regions and about the upcoming International Polar Year! This is a great site, with many amazing blogs! Here at SOI, we have just wrapped up another exciting Antarctic expedition - you can view highlights from the trip on our SOI website. We have invited our SOI alumni to visit this site, to explore the other blogs, and post their impressions, hopes and memories of Antarctica here. Many of our alumni are busy with environmental issues - some polar, some otherwise - and we are encouragin...

I’ve been doing field work in Alaska since 2001, both for my PhD research and for my job as a Research Ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Most of it has involved tromping through scraggly black spruce forests, which range from dry to boggy. While the wet, boggy sites are harder to walk around in, and usually have orders of magnitude more mosquitoes, they can actually be pleasant places to hang out (provided you’ve come equipped with the proper bug gear). The trees are sparse and small in stature, so the sunlight is bright and you can see quite a bit of the surrounding area. The variety of groundcover plants can be really interesting too – I particularly like the little sundews and red Sphagnum mosses. ...

The thought of writing a science fiction story for the Polaris anthology filled me with trepidation. Science wasn’t exactly my strongest subject in high school. Then I looked at the research that scientists were doing for the IPY, some of which was happening in my own back yard, the Yukon. So I did some research of my own – on the Internet, in science magazines and in books – and I kept coming back to permafrost. In the Yukon, you have to pay attention to how permafrost is going to affect your plans, whether it’s building a house or putting in a highway. The history of the Alaska Highway is rife with stories of how engineers ignored permafrost at thei...

The Marine Advanced Technology Education (MATE) Center and the Marine Technology Society’s ROV Committee organize an annual International ROV Competition for middle school through university-level students worldwide. In recognition of IPY, the 2007 competition is challenging students to design and build ROVs (“underwater robots”) for science, exploration, and industry operations in polar environments. On this blog you will learn more about the 2007 international event, which is taking place June 22-24 at Memorial University and the Institute for Ocean Technology in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. You will also hear from so...

If you're a lover of the novels of Magnus Mills, then you may have read his Explorers of the New Century, in which two rival expeditions traverse distinctly polar terrain. The expeditions are vying to be the first to arrive at the "Agreed Furthest Point" (AFP), the point furthest from civilization. Imagine my surprise to find out that there actually is such a point in real life, called the Southern Pole of Inaccessibility — it's the point on the Anta...

Nobody appreciates the impact of Arctic change more than the people who live there. A unique feature of this IPY is a focus on understanding how people observe and respond to change. People are not passive observers but integral parts of the Arctic system. The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC recently ended an exhibition that put a human face on the warming of the Arctic. A new web site incorporates images and information from that exhibition -- Arctic: A Friend Acting Strangely. The National Snow and Ice Data Center also distributes a multimedia product, ...

Countries around the world are issuing special stamps to herald the arrival of International Polar Year 2007-2008. The initiative is being spearheaded by eight Arctic nations — the United States, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. In addition to the individual releases, a booklet of souvenir sheets will be issued containing all eight sets. The U.S. Postal Service will issue a souvenir sheet of two 84-cent international letter rate stamps which will also be issued as a pane of 20 under the title ‘Polar Lights’. In 1958, the United States issued a three-cent stamp to commemorate the International Geophysical Year 1957-58. ...

The Arctic sea ice cover is undergoing significant climate-induced changes, resulting in a reduction in ice extent and a net thinning of the sea ice cover. During IPY researchers from 10 nations will be studying the properties and processes that govern this sea ice cover and exploring its role as an indicator and amplifier of climate change. Numerous techniques will be brought to bear on this task, including expeditions, satellite remote sensing, autonomous rovers, buoys, ocean moorings, and numerical models.

The 2007-2008 International Polar Year (IPY) provides an international framework for improving our understanding of high-latitude climate change and enhancing our skill in predicting world-wide impacts. Recent, well documented observations of the dramatically changing high-latitude components of earth’s cryosphere (e.g., those areas where water is frozen either seasonally or permanently) make IPY science investigations particularly timely and relevant to scientists, policy makers and the general public. Effective IPY investigations require a range of commitments of resources: from providing support to individual field activities, to those which require the international coordination of complex systems and their operations. During IPY, to date considerable progress is being made towards characterisation of key high-latitude processes by means of spaceborne snapshots of the polar regions. A number of ongoing efforts are described below which are designed to coordinate these satellite acquisitions, to help demonstrate the benefits of a cryospheric observing system component, and to develop IPY data legacy comprising critical climate benchmarks.