Smithsonian at the Poles: Contributions to International Polar

xiv SMITHSONIAN AT THE POLES
Museum (NASM) houses a substantial collection related
to the space explorations from the IGY era.
Since the 1970s, the Smithsonian has been actively
engaged in Antarctic research, initially through hosting
(since 1976) the U.S. Antarctic Meteorite Program, a cooperative
effort with NASA and NSF aimed at collection,
curation, and long-term storage of meteorites recovered
from the Antarctic ice sheets by U.S. scientists. Today,
curators of the NMNH Department of Mineral Sciences
classify each of the meteorites accessioned and publish the
results in the Antarctic Meteorite Newsletter, issued biannually
by NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
For decades, the Smithsonian has focused sociocultural
and heritage studies on the indigenous people
of the Arctic, supported by its long-established tradition
of cultural research in the North and its northern ethnographic
collections from Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and
Siberia. Since 1988, these efforts have been spearheaded
through the creation of the Smithsonian’s polar cultural
studies unit, the Arctic Studies Center (ASC) at NMNH’s
Department of Anthropology. Under a cooperative agreement
with the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, the
ASC operates its Alaskan regional offi ce in Anchorage.
In the 1990s, NMNH agreed to host the national
Antarctic invertebrate collection for the NSF United States
Antarctic Program (USAP), which now also incorporates
the Palmer Long-Term Ecological research (LTER)
voucher specimens. Now totaling over 900,000 specimens,
170,000 specimens have been loaned in 138 separate lots
to polar researchers in 22 countries. The precursor of this
collection was the Smithsonian Oceanographic Sorting
Center, which processed over 38 million polar specimens
and distributed them to the scientifi c community between
1965 and 1992 (Moser and Nicol, 1997).
One of the Smithsonian’s long-term polar ventures
is its astrophysical projects at the South Pole station in
Antarctica. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s
(SAO) Antarctic projects have included the Antarctic Submillimeter
Telescope and Remote Observatory (AST/RO)
operated by SAO 1995–2007 as part of the Center for
Astrophysical Research in Antarctica, under NSF agreement.
Now SAO collaborates on several projects using the
newly built South Pole Telescope (SPT), a 10-m diameter
telescope for millimeter and submillimeter observations.
The SPT holds the promise of making a signifi cant breakthrough
in our understanding of the universe and of physics
in general by surveying the entire southern sky, onethird
of the celestial sphere, and potentially discovering
30,000 new clusters of galaxies during the next two to
three years. This data will provide substantially improved
measures of “dark energy,” the newly discovered force
that is driving the acceleration of the universe.
Since 2001, the Smithsonian Scientifi c Diving Program
(SDP), established by the Offi ce of the Under Secretary for
Science in 1990, has managed the NSF Offi ce of Polar Programs—sponsored
scientifi c diving activities at the U.S.
Antarctic McMurdo and Palmer Stations and from the research
vessels L.M. Gould and N.B. Palmer. On average,
35 scientists have dived under ice each year through USAP
dive program. More than 4,800 scientifi c ice dives were
logged during 2000–2005. Formal ice diving training is
provided by the SDP through biannual ice diving courses
in Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard. The USAP scientifi c diving exposures
enjoy a remarkable safety record and proven scientifi
c productivity as an underwater research tool. Polar
diving history spans only 60 years, since the United States’
fi rst major post-war Antarctic venture and the invention
of the scuba regulator, and was thus not represented well
until this fourth IPY.
Smithsonian scientists are actively engaged in IPY
2007–2008 projects from astrophysical observations at
the South Pole to the use of Smithsonian collections in
educational and knowledge preservation programs in indigenous
communities across the Arctic. Ongoing projects
include: the Photobiology and Solar Radiation Antarctic
Research Program, supported by the Smithsonian Environmental
Research Center (SERC) and NSF; Northern
Latitudes Invasions Biology (NLIB) by SERC’s Invasions
Biology Program; NMNH’s professional collections management
services provided for the NSF USAP and the international
scientifi c community through the “USNM Polar
Invertebrate Online Databases”; investigations of Weddell
seal energetics, supported by NSF and conducted by the
Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park; and bipolar international
polar diving safety research in Svalbard and
McMurdo Station (Lang and Sayer, 2007).
For the fourth IPY in 2007–2008, there was Smithsonian
representation in all interagency planning meetings.
Igor Krupnik served on the fi rst U.S. National IPY Committee
in 2003–2005 (NAS, 2004) and since 2004 on the
Joint Committee for IPY 2007–2008, the international
steering body that supervises planning and implementation,
to represent social and human studies.
By its very nature, each International Polar Year is an
invitation to the history of science, polar research, and the
legacy of polar exploration. Launched approximately every
50 years (or after 25 years in the case of International
Geophysical Year 1957–1958), these international ventures
create incentives for scientists to test earlier records and to
revisit the studies of their predecessors. Each new initiative