IPY starts in March 2007, but not everybody is waiting until then to start celebrating the poles. L.A.-based artist Lita Albuquerque has just announced that she will be creating an installation piece on Antarctica in next month, Dec 22, 2006. The piece will be named "Stellar Axis: Antarctica" and is produced at the invitation of the US National Science Foundation's Artists and Writers Program. Lita's project already has an accompanying website, which in time will contain video and diary entries documenting the art installation process. You can also read the press release, and you can find out...

Huge areas of sea floor (around 3,250 km²) have been freed up by the collapse 4 years ago of the Larsen B platform along the Antarctic Peninsula – leaving a blank spot on Antarctic maps.Polarstern, the research flagship of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, will shortly conduct there the first major biological research. The Science25 different research projects will be undertaken by 47 scientists, encompassing disciplines as diverse as benthology, plankton...

The Arctic and Antarctic have popped up in some of the most unusual places in popular culture, not the least of which is the cigarette card. The cigarette card sprang into existence in the mid to late nineteenth century, and was originally nothing more than a blank card inserted as a stiffener for a paper pack of cigarettes. By the 1880s, American and British companies started putting pictures of products on one side of a card, and later, information related to the picture was added to the other side. People started collecting the cards, thus the hobby of cartophily was born. As a lure to buy more cigarettes, cards were based on a common topic and organized into sets (usually 50 in number). Topics were as diverse as fire fighting equipment, Br...

This winter, a major new telescope is being built at the South Pole to study deep questions about the history and composition of the universe. The 10-meter (33-foot) diameter South Pole Telescope (SPT) will be pieced together by a team of two dozen scientists, engineers, and technicians in record time. In a special series of four live webcasts, blogs, and video updates from the South Pole to the Exploratorium website in November and December 2006, follow along as a team of cosmologists from the University of Chicago and their colleagues race to complete their project before the short Antarctic season comes to a close. The South Pole Telescope is one of the major scientific projects launching during the...

Three researchers from the University of Lapland's Arctic Centre are in Antarctica and are blogging their research and life there: Glaciologist-paleoclimatologist John Moore, geophysicist Aslak Grinsted and chemist Kristiina Virkkunen. Their blog is here. They are doing research on a blue ice area about 200 km from Abo...

The Arctic ice shelf could completely melt during summer by 2080 because of global warming, according to scientists from the DAMOCLES programme. If the situation evolves like physics predicts, the summertime Arctic shelf will completely disappear by 2080, confirmed Eberhard Fahrbach of the Alfred Wegner Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven. This will have consequences above and beyond those in the Antarctic, he added. For example, climate change not only threatens polar bears that live in these regions but the entire Arctic food chain. This even has consequences for the fish that ultimately ends up on our tables,” said Fahrbach. DAMOCLES (Developing...

Several traverses across Antarctica are occurring this season, studying the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. They all have very informative and helpful web pages, as well as daily or weekly updates about their progress. Previous Expeditions: More information on previous International Antarctic Traverses can be found on the following pages: Summary of International Trans-Antarctic Scientific Expeditions (ITASE) Previous scientific traverses across East Antarctica almost fifty years ago Current Expeditions: ...

Jean-Baptiste August Charcot (1867-1936) was the son of a well known and wealthy French neurologist. Although he completed his medical studies, he had no wish to to practice medicine and embarked on a career as a polar explorer. He built the Français for his first expedition (1903-05), and accurately surveyed the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula. Afterwards, he built the most modern polar ship known to that date, the Pourquoi-Pas? (Why Not?), and extended his work along the Peninsula during 1908-10. He explored 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles) of unknown coastline. Between 1926-36, Charcot made regular oceanographic voyages to the Greenland Sea. In September 1936, the Pourquoi-Pas? wrecked along the Icelandic coast, where Charcot and most of his cr...

Departing Oslo this morning under a blue sky and mirror calm sea, we cast off the mooring lines even more excited for our upcoming adventure. Tying up alongside the museum of the Fram, the ship of Fridtjof Nansen, has provided us with an inspiring insight into an expedition from the ‘heroic age’ of polar exploration. While the conception of Tara was based on the same principles as the Fram, to see this vast wooden ship in all her splendor has given us even more of a feeling of connection to this historic vessel. During our brief stop we also had the pleasure to meet Liv Arnesen, a Norwegian adventurer who was the first women to ski solo and unsupported to the South Pole in 1994. Liv is planning to Ski to the North Pole from Canada next year and will possibly finish her ...

1957 saw an explosion of activity in the Arctic under the banner of the International Geophysical Year. Scientists poured into the frozen and unforgiving landscape to study ice, weather, magnetism and glaciers among a wide variety of disciplines with the aim of increasing our knowledge of the region and its implications on the so-called civilised world. At the time, when scientists were making their tortuous journeys north and fighting to erect their heavy canvas tents, I was barely a year old. In the same year the launch of Sputnik heralded the beginning of an entire new era of technology. It was a time of optimism and the future looked bright, we could be forgiven for not understanding the sinister fate that awaited the Arctic – a fate that would be studied by a whole ...