To ensure the preservation of and broad, interdisciplinary, and non- expert access to IPY and related data, the IPY Data Policy and Management Subcommittee is charged with developing an overall data management strategy. To develop this strategy, including the general organizational data flow structure, we request that Project Coordinators fill out a short survey on their data management requirements and plans on the IPYDIS Registration Page.

If you have any questions or comments or require any further information, please email

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 Aboa, the Finnish research station. The main goal of the expedition is to collect an approximately 500-meter long horizontal ice core for climate history studies. The ice samples will later be analyzed in Finland for ions. Other experiments will look at the dust content and electric conductivity of the ice using different methods, including lasers.

The International Polar Year 2007-2008, and a wide array of polar sciences, will have a strong presence during the Fall AGU Meetings in San Francisco in December 2006. More than ten oral and poster sessions carry the IPY label or the label of an IPY-endorsed project. More than 30 additonal sessions address polar themes, from ice core science to biogeochemistry of northern watersheds. The IPY IPO has assembled a list of all these polar sessions on a single sheet for your use; here it is, as a PDF. IPY IPO will also operate a display booth, cooperatively with the US NSF Office of Polar Programs. We will share many international materials promoting IPY and operate a polar message center. Please visit us at booths 825 and 823.

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.

Continue reading Polar Cigarette Cards.

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.

Continue reading Ice-breaker Polarstern to explore Antarctic seafloor.