Researchers Take Poles' Temperature
Pastor Dale Morgan
Feb 26, 7:12 PM EST
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Researchers Take Poles' Temperature*
By RAPHAEL G. SATTER
Associated Press Writer
LONDON (AP) -- More than 50,000 scientists from 63 nations turned their
attention to the world's poles Monday to measure the effects of climate
change, using icebreakers, satellites and submarines to study everything
from the effect of solar radiation on the polar atmosphere to the exotic
marine life swimming beneath the Antarctic ice.
The International Polar Year unifies 228 research projects under a
single umbrella with the aim of monitoring the health of the Earth's
polar regions and gauging the impact of global warming. The largest
international research program in 50 years, the project officially
begins March 1 and ends in 2009 - to allow each pole to run through a
full summer and winter.
"Global warming is the most challenging problem that our civilization
has faced," Britain's chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, said in
a video played before the event's launch. He called the melting of polar
ice "the canary in the coal mine for global warming."
The year is being sponsored by the U.N.'s World Meteorological
Organization and the International Council for Science. About $1.5
billion has been earmarked for the year's projects by various national
exploration agencies, but most of the money comes from pre-existing
polar research budgets.
While the increase in resources available to explorers is modest,
British scientists said that the project had the potential to yield a
complete picture of the threat facing the polar world - known to
scientists as the cryosphere.
"What's different this year is not so much the volume of research
funding, but more the coordination of research," said Eric Wolff, a
British Antarctic survey scientist.
Besides yielding a more complete picture of the impact of global
warming, the cooperation will help tackle polar science's most vexing
problems, such as the challenge of trying to quantify the amount of
fresh water leaking out from underneath ice sheets in Antarctica. The
melting - which is distinct from the break up of glaciers - has alarmed
climate scientists because it takes place beneath the ice and is
difficult to measure.
Wolff said that estimates of the leakage taken from ships off the coast
of the continent offered an incomplete picture of the problem because
currents could draw the melt to other areas.
"It's only by getting all the ships that you have available to do the
same thing at the same time that you get a snapshot of the whole
Antarctic," Wolff said.
Other projects include the installation of an Arctic Ocean monitoring
system, described as an early warning system for climate change, and a
census of the deep-sea creatures which populate the bottom of
Antarctica's Southern Ocean.
Few aspects of the cryosphere will escape scrutiny. The Antarctic's
lakes and mountains - some which have been trapped under about three
miles of ice for more than 35 million years - will be sounded. Using
telescopes, balloons, and spacecraft, scientists at the poles will
investigate plasma and magnetic fields kicked up by the sun - the dry,
clear polar air is ideal for astronomy. Anthropologists are also
planning to study the culture and politics of some the Arctic's 4
million inhabitants.
Although each project has its own scope, almost all touch in some way on
the fear that the environment they were studying might someday melt
away. At the year's launch, it was clear what scientists expected to
find amid the ice and snow.
"We are now on an unsustainable path," said Corinne Le Quere, a
professor at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. "By
seeing the changes as they occur in the region where they will be
occurring the fastest, the International Polar Year will provide
blinding evidence of the human impact on this planet."
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Associated Press Science Writer Seth Borenstein contributed to this
report from Washington, D.C.