Thank-you to everyone who was involved with launch events, who launched virtual balloons, who launched real balloons (see the Swedish launch web-cast!), those behind the scenes, and those on stage. IPY Celebrations around the world on March 1st, and throughout this week, have been a huge success. You can watch those you missed on the Arctic Portal, or still launch your virtual balloon now, and throughout IPY, to recognise the importance of the polar regions to the whole planet. Here is a map showing balloons that have been launched around the world (you can zoom in on where you live or zoom out to see the world map!): ...

As this week starts I am already feeling like a potato. Extremely busy weeks have gone by, filled with all the wonderful exiting stuff you can do in Svalbard, both science and non-science. I am working on my master's thesis at the moment. It is about the Mediumfjellet thrust stack, located at the western side of Isforden on Svalbard, and I am making fracture models for predicting reservoir quality. At the moment I am trying to get into stratigraphy and other work that has been done in the area, to be ready for my five-week long fieldwork trip in august. Being a student at UNIS and at Svalbard does not only mean hard work. Nevertheless, I think this is the place where I have developed my skills the most. Lots of extremely great and exclusive things are going ...

Thank-you to everyone who was involved with launch events, who launched virtual balloons, who launched real balloons (see the Swedish launch web-cast!), those behind the scenes, and those on stage. IPY Celebrations around the world on March 1st, and throughout this week, have been a huge success. You can watch those you missed on the Arctic Portal, or still launch your virtual balloon now, and throughout IPY, to recognise the importance of the polar regions to the whole planet. Here is a map showing balloons that have been launched around the world (you can zoom in on where you live or zoom out to see the world map!): ...

The International Polar Year Publications Database (IPYPD) is now available at the IPYPD website. The IPYPD will attempt to identify and describe all publications that result from, or that are about, the International Polar Year (IPY) 2007-2008 and the three previous IPYs. The IPYPD currently describes 60 publications. This number is expected to grow to approximately 20,000 publications ten years from now. The IPYPD will be updated four times per year. The records in the IPYPD contain citations, detailed subject and geographic indexing terms, abstracts, and, in most cases, links to the online full text of the publications. The IPYPD is part of the IPY Data and Information Service (IPYDIS). The success of t...

IPY launch events around the world can be viewed live at the Arctic Portal. We also encourage everyone to launch a virtual balloon and show how many people around the world care about the polar regions and are interested in IPY. Everyone is welcome to join in, young or old, polar or tropical! The Official Opening Ceremony takes place in Paris at 11am local time. That is UTC 10:00, or, 1am in Anchorage, 5am in New York, 7am in Santiago, 3.30pm in Calcutta, 7pm in Tokyo, and 9pm in Sydney. You can watch it live or after the event on the web at the Arctic Portal, where you will also find webcasts of other national launch events from around th...

Join the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) team on the redesigned Antarctica UAB website as we explore the spectacular marine life around Palmer Station on the western Antarctic Peninsula. As part of the celebration of the International Polar Year, we want to help showcase the diversity of international cooperation in polar research and validate its worth in the public's eye. We invite you to visit the site, post comments/questions and join us as we bring the world to Antarctica during our NSF-funded expedition. The site combines traditional Web features with social networking Web sites like Digg.com and Del.icio.us. You can contribute your own knowledge, images and viewpoints as well as fo...

For the official launch in Paris at Palais de la d'couverte on 1st of March, the french postal administration, in connection with the french branch of the International Association for Polar Philately, "A.I.Phi.Pol", will open a special postal station with a special cancellation and postal stationary (pre-stamped envelope) especially designed for this historic day. The special postal station will be open in the morning for the conference attenders and in the afternoon for the public. The "A.I.Phi.Pol" have also arranged to have a small quantity of booklets available containing IPY stamps from the eight arctic countries. The booklets will be available on the opening day at the face value. To reserve a booklet, please email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it "

The International Polar Year 2007-08 will be launched on the 1st of March. Across both hemispheres, dozens of nations are organizing events and ceremonies both large and small to celebrate the occasion. Together, they will engage experts, children and the general public, and will play an important role in raising awareness as to the Polar Regions' central relevance as climate archives, early warning systems, threatened habitats, and (in the case of the Arctic) homes to indigenous cultures.(This article does not aim to present each and every IPY related event or initiative. For more information on this vast collaborative effort, please refer to the ...

Gone fishing? IPY flying high at midnight on 1 January 2007 at SANAE IV, the South African research base on Vesleskarvet in Dronning Maud Land Antarctica (71

The following two postdoctoral fellowships are available on International Polar Year 2007-2008 projects led by the Environment and Natural Resources Institute at University of Alaska Anchorage: Soil Ecology, Soil Biogeochemistry The incumbent will conduct and supervise experimental work elucidating the consequences of deeper snow, shrub increases, and effects on soil-plant dynamics. The fellow will join a team that has conduced long-term experiments at Toolik Lake, Alaska since 1994 as part of ITEX (International Tundra Experiment) and has established a new set of experimental snow depth treatments that will be used in this research. A significant port...