The overall goal of this initiative is to advance our knowledge of climate warming in the Arctic, by studying past climate change. We will focus mainly on the ocean circulation and climate of the NW Eurasian continental margin. The present climate in the Arctic shows signs of rapid change with decreasing sea ice cover and increasing temperature of the Atlantic Water. The implications of this warming are highly uncertain, as modelling experiments projecting temperatures for the next 100 years show a largescatter at high northern latitudes.

The Antarctic Peninsula is one of the Earth’s three most rapidly warming regions: most of the glaciers there are in retreat and large ice shelves have broken up. This project investigates the impact of these changes on the plants and animals that live on the land, the shore and coastal sea around the Antarctic Peninsula. Organisms are facing a barrage of complex effects including warming, decreased ice and snow cover, increased iceberg grounding, sedimentation and freshening. A wide range of apparatus and techniques will be used from remote operated vehicles (ROV) and simple underwater light meters to satellite imagery and counting microscopic life. ClicOPEN scientists from 15 countries will study changes in the environments and organisms around a number of retreating glaciers of the Western Antarctic Peninsula. Most of Antarctica's very rich biodiversity lives nowhere else in the world and we know little about how it will responding to such exceptional and unprecedented warming.

Sámi -- their lives and culture -- have been depicted as objects throughout history both in images and texts. This project explores representations of Sámi made by four prominent nineteenth-century researchers who travelled in the north of Sweden, Norway, Finland and to Spetsbergen. Working in Sweden, these scientits (Göran Wahlenberg (1780-1851), Lars Levi Læstadius (1800-1861), Sven Lovén (1809-1895) and Axel Hamberg (1863-1933)) had degrees in or did research in geology, botany, ocenography and zoology.

Within natural science at that time, "objectifiation" was quite common: researchers identified, mapped and explained plants, animals, rock, snow, glaciers, weather conditions such as snow and wind. Sámi were similary objectified in the researchers' writings. Nevertheless were the researchers sometimes interested in the knowledge the Sámi had and also used them as reindeer herders when transporting the researchers and their equipment, when going animal hunting, or used them as guides.

The result of the field science the researchers carried out was the foundation of new scholarly fields; a natural scientific Sámi anthropology and a natural scientific Sámi ethnography. Even if the scholarly fields were new -- it was not that common for natural scientists to do research on Sámi -- much of the so-called knowledge about the Sámi within theses fields was based on references to art, missionaries' and priests' descriptions of Sámi, and even from the Icelandic sagas. Thus the natural scientists constructed an image, a representation, of Sámi or even a Sámi culture that was based on older representations of the Sámi. This process was linked to the industrialisation in Sweden where forests, minings and water power were developed. Science developed at the same time as a tool for this industrialisation explotation. Thus the new scholarly fields with Sámi as research objects became a part of that Swedish-Nordic colonisation of the North."

The Circumpolar Flaw Lead (CFL) System Study is a major international effort under Canadian leadership that aims at understanding how changes in the physical system affect biological processes, towards a better understanding of the potential effects of climate change. The CFL project is part of the PAN-AME cluster.

The project HERMES is designed to gain new insights into the biodiversity, structure, function and dynamics of ecosystems along Europe's deep-ocean margin to underpin the future development of a comprehensive European Ocean and Seas Integrated Governance Policy. It represents the first major attempt to understand European deep-water ecosystems and their environment in an integrated way (geosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere of a pan-European range). HERMES aims to compare and contrast selected environments around the European margin from high northern latitudes (focus of this IPY proposal) to the Black Sea.

Scientists from Europe, North America and New Zealand will investigate how the presence of snow and ice affects the chemistry of air above the polar ice caps. In the Arctic and Antarctic, sunlight triggers the release of chemicals from surface snow into the lower atmosphere. Salty sea ice surfaces host some very interesting chemistry (involving bromine compounds) during the polar spring when the sun comes back. These processes affect air quality and the interpretation of past climate using ice cores. If the amount of sea ice changes the chemical content of the lowest parts of the polar atmosphere will also change.