During the mid-1950s, Britain was basking in the afterglow of the golden age of polar exploration. The expeditions of Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton were still in living memory when Vivian Fuchs and Edmund Hilary, the latter fresh from his conquest of Mount Everest, set sail from Southampton in November 1955 amid flags and fanfares to attempt to cross the Antarctic continent for the first time.There was much less fuss a week later when the MV Tottan slipped out of the same port bound for the same destination. On board was the advance party for the 1957 International Geophysics Year (IGY), an 18-month intensive science campaign on the continent. Among them was 28-year-old David Limbert, who had been drafted in at the last minute to help set up an Antarctic base that would act as a focus for science during that time.“There was still a sense of the heroic age when we set out,” Limbert recalls. “We even ate the same type of pemmican as Scott.” There was also a strong military emphasis. In 1943, Britain’s war defences had stretched to Antarctica when a small expedition known as Operation Tabarin had established bases for monitoring German warship activities. It seemed natural, then, that the advance party would be led by captains and colonels and supplied with ex-War Department clothing and Army rations.The sense of isolation also tied these pioneers closer to Shackleton’s era than to the satellite-phone-wielding scientists of today. In the year when the airwaves were buzzing with news of the Suez Crisis, the Prague Spring and the Hungarian Uprising, members of the advance party for the IGY were restricted to sending home a 100-word letter each month by Morse code. “For some men, however, the isolation was part of the attraction of going – it was a great way of leaving things behind,” Limbert says with a smile.Limbert was a meteorologist, but he spent most of the first half of 1956 as a carpenter’s mate, fitting in his observations between spells of construction of the base on an ice shelf two kilometres inland from the Weddell Sea. The following year, 25 scientists took up residence there, part of a huge expansion of the UK’s scientific presence on the continent and a global push to understand the South Pole’s influence on the rest of the world.The IGY also represented a quantum leap in international cooperation, drawing post-Stalinist Russia, China and India to a continent that has always prided itself on putting science before politics. More than 20 nations took part in experiments covering ionospherics, meteorology and the Earth’s magnetic field, at an estimated cost of US$280million. Fifty-five recording stations were established on the continent, many of which are still in use today; Limbert’s base has now become Halley Station, one of three Antarctic science bases operated by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS).The ability to make simultaneous measurements across the continent pushed forward understanding of the aurora australis and other atmospheric phenomena. The spatial spread of recording stations allowed scientists to unravel new secrets about the physical nature of Antarctica, such as the amount of ice and the nature of the continent beneath. Its success stimulated a copycat initiative for biology: Antarctic science had come of age.

Ambitious programme

Fast forward 50 years and polar science is in the spotlight once more. This month sees the start of an ambitious new programme that encompasses both the Arctic and the Antarctic: the International Polar Year 2007–08 (IPY). Like all good sequels, this one is bigger and better than its predecessor. Involving more than 50,000 scientists and support staff from more than 60 nations, this is science on a truly global scale.The mastermind of this bold programme is softly spoken Canadian Dave Carlson, director of the IPY, who works from an office at the BAS in Cambridge. “We are studying the same subject as 50 years ago, but that’s where the similarities end,” he explains. “The IGY focused on geophysics in the Antarctic, but the IPY is looking at both polar regions in a much broader way, taking in biology, ecology and human health.”To illustrate his point, Carlson unravels a chart that shows how the 211 planned projects spread across eight topics – earth, land, people, ocean, ice, atmosphere, space and education – and over the two poles. With research topics ranging from the biodiversity of Arctic spiders to the evolution of the Antarctic climate, it seems as if no stone of polar knowledge will be left unturned.The IGY kick-started serious scientific study of the polar regions, and after 50 years, we now know that these areas hold some of the keys that wind the world. Their climates drive the global atmospheric circulation, their waters feed the world’s oceans, their ice acts as a thermostat for the planet. And whereas the IGY was as much about simple discovery as it was about science, the IPY is more about survival.Thanks to global warming, we now live on a rapidly changing planet, and that change is at its most profound at the poles. Climate maps show that areas such as the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, Alaska and Siberia will warm at more than double the rate we can expect in the UK. This makes the poles the early warning system for the rest of the world, if we can understand change there, then it may just help us to save the planet.Anyone questioning the need to understand this region need only listen to some of the recent alarm bells echoing out from the poles. In December last year, a NASA-backed study by the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Colorado and two US universities concluded that the Arctic Ocean could be ice-free during the summer by 2040. Ships will be able to sail across the top of the world and tourists will be able to visit what was once one of planet’s most inaccessible quarters.An ice-free seaway will open up a new frontier in the search for gas and oil. At the end of this year, Norway expects to bring ashore its first supplies of Arctic natural gas. Experts estimate that the ‘Snow White’ gas field, located under the waters of the Barents Sea,145 kilometres off the coast north of Hammerfest, a place that brands itself the world’s northernmost town, could hold as much as seven billion barrels of oil equivalent. WWF has already warned that the risks from increasing oil exploration and other activities in what it describes as ‘Europe’s last wild sea’ pose serious threats to the marine ecosystem.And the disappearing ice is already causing problems for the polar bear. The World Conservation Union recently reported that the number of polar bear populations in decline had increased from one in 2001 to five in 2006. With only 19 polar bear populations in the world, this decline represents more then a quarter of the species’ populations. The two best-studied polar bear communities in the world, in Canada and the USA, have seen their numbers fall by 22 per cent and 17 per cent respectively over the past two decades.And it isn’t just animals that have been affected. In 2005, at the UN Conference on Climate Change in Montreal, Inuit campaigners presented a petition claiming that the US government was violating their human rights by refusing to limit its greenhouse gas emissions. The petition alleged that climate change threatens their right to use and enjoy their traditional lands and personal property, their right to health, life and movement and to their livelihood. Although the claim was rejected last December, this action may well be a sign of things to come.

Sophisticated models

The scale of today’s problems may be different to those of the 1950s, but Carlson believes that this is matched by advances in the tools available for solving them. “The IGY was about observation, people gathering new sets of direct measurements,” he says. “Today, we already know so much more; we’re awash with data. Where the IGY saw the launch of the first monitoring satellite, today we have 12 polar orbiting satellites and 20 geostationary satellites. You can monitor ice conditions in real time from almost anywhere. We can predict the weather and model the ocean temperature. Remember, there were no computers during the IGY, no digital recording and calculations were laboriously carried out by hand. We can probably collect more data in a day than was collected during the entire IGY campaign. This has enabled the development of ever more sophisticated models, extending our understanding of polar processes such as ocean circulation, boundary layer meteorology and ice dynamics in ways IGY scientists could have only dreamed about.”Despite the breathtaking scope of the IPY programme, the complex nature of science in the Earth’s most inhospitable regions means that it won’t deliver a ‘theory of everything’ for the poles. But it will hopefully provide new insights into the influence of the poles on our world and provide lessons for life from studying the people who live there.Researchers are hoping to discover more about the amounts of snow and ice locked up at the poles and how it’s changing and the ways in which the ice-sheets and glaciers affect our climate. We can learn about the global impact of changes at the poles, of sea level rise and weather system interconnections. People living in polar regions will be among the first to feel the impact of climate change, but they won’t be the last. We will all need to adapt to the changes ahead. By learning from those whose traditional ways and resources are already being affected,we may be able to help ourselves adapt better to the future.The organisers of the IPY also hope that the research efforts will lead to a new way of doing science. As global systems don’t work in isolation, neither can we hope to understand them by applying just a single branch of science. The best learning will be delivered by cross-cutting, integrated, multidisciplinary scientists working together and sharing data.“Scientists have to embrace the fact that they need each other,” Carlson says. He points a finger at one of the projects on the page in front of him. “We have a project here on bird health,” he continues, then points to another project on Arctic predators, “but you can’t study bird health without knowing about what’s going them eat them. You also need to know what’s happening to what they eat, and if they’re migratory birds, you need to know about the meteorology on their flight path,” he says as he stabs at another two projects. Before long,he’s made links with half a dozen complementary projects.Similar connections could easily be made for each of the other projects in front of us. If we’re going to use the polar science learned during the IPY effectively to understand the world in which we live, it seems as if we’re going to have to begin by learning to understand each other.