International Polar Year

Published on Tuesday, January 2, 2007 by Agence France Presse

International Polar Year Aims to Shed Light on Ends of Earth

by Guillaume Lavallee

Researchers from some 60 countries will try to better understand the Earth's poles in 2007 and the effect of climate change as part of the first "International Polar Year" since the 1950s.

The scientific effort, unlike previous undertakings, will be marked by the specter of global warming and transformed by collaboration with Inuits living in the Arctic.

  
Undated NASA composite image shows a fully dark (city lights) full disk image centered on the North Pole. Researchers from some 60 countries will try to better understand the Earth's poles in 2007 and the effect of climate change as part of the first "International Polar Year" since the 1950s.(AFP/NASA-HO/File)

Experts studying the Arctic and Antarctic are expected to receive a funding boost from the International Polar Year (IPY), an elaborate program that will inject close to 500 million dollars into polar research.

This is the fourth IPY to be organized -- the three others took place in 1882-83, 1932-33 and 1957-58 -- but it is the first time that it will be carried out against the backdrop of climate change.

"Close to 60 percent of what is known about the polar regions, particularly the Arctic, comes from research carried out in 1958," said Louis Fortier, scientific director of ArcticNet, a Canadian research network on the Arctic. The difference today is that the new polar year will occur in the context of global warming," Fortier told AFP.

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International Polar Year Aims to Shed Light on Ends of Earth
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