I thought I was the first Portuguese to study Wandering albatrosses but I was five hundred years too late. When fifteenth-century Portuguese sailors first ventured down the coast of Africa, they encountered large black and white birds with stout bodies, which they called alcatraz, the Portuguese word for large seabirds; English sailors later corrupted alcatraz to albatross. I was studying aspects of their diet and feeding behaviour in ways that could not be done five hundred years ago, information which may help save them from extinction. That made me feel better...

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This is an essay that won the New Scientist/Wellcome trust essay competition which can show some of the Portuguese passion we have for polar research and conservation of special polar organisms. More writing to come on this site...

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Of course, not al information is geospatial in nature. But when it comes to the poles, a lot of it is. That's why the content on this website is designed to be geospatially referenced, if it is at all relevant.

This in turn means that the RSS feeds for the news and calendar on this site use GeoRSS, which adds the coordinates to individual posts, if it makes sense.

As an example of what that means, take a look at this map of the content on this site made with one of the first GeoRSS aggregators, Mapufacture.

Welcome to the pre-launch site of the IPY International Program Office (IPO). This is the place to come to for news, events and links related to the International Polar Year in anticipation of the fully-fledged IPY portal, expected to go live in October.

What www.ipy.org/start allows us to do is to start experimenting with our voices and styles, and see what kind of georeferencing for content works best. And by the time the official IPY portal goes live, we'll have lots of content to populate it with. We expect the URLs here to be permanent, however, so link away.

This site is also a work in progress. Over the next week or two, expect to see better visualization tools for calendars, and also an iCal feed for events.

Continue reading This website is now live….

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 crew perished.

Continue reading Polar Explorer: Jean-Baptiste August Charcot.

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.

Continue reading Tara in Norway.