International Polar Year 2007–2008 - WMO

humanities (arts, history, narratives) or from what is
commonly called ‘academic research’ and indigenous
knowledge. IPY 2007–2008 was a great experiment in
demonstrating the power of multiple perspectives in
many of its multi-disciplinary projects, but also specifically,
thanks to the inclusion of social sciences, humanities,
arts and indigenous knowledge with their very
diverse vision, data collecting and roots.
Bringing together those diverse types of knowing,
though not artificially merging (‘integrating’) them,
increases the power of understanding; it also helps
illuminate phenomena that are often beyond the
radar of scientific research. For example, ice scientists,
climate modelers, oceanographers, local subsistence
users, anthropologists, mariners and science historians
have remarkably different vision of polar sea ice. To
various groups of scientists, sea ice is a multi-faceted
physical and natural entity: an ocean-atmosphere
heat fluxes regulator, a climate trigger and indicator, a
habitat (platform) for ice-associated species and/or an
ecosystem built around periodically frozen saltwater.
To polar explorers and historians, sea ice was first
Fig. 2.10-3. CAVIAR
interpretative
framework for
community
vulnerability and
resilience assessment
(Smit et al., 2008).
and foremost a formidable obstacle to humanity’s
advance to the Poles (Bravo, 2010). Polar indigenous
people view sea ice primarily as a cultural landscape;
an interactive social environment that is created and
recreated every year by the power of their cultural
knowledge. It incorporates local ice terminologies
and classifications, ice-built trails and routes with
associated place names, stories, teachings, safety
rules, historic narratives, as well as core empirical
and spiritual connections that polar people maintain
with the natural world (Krupnik et al., 2010). Cultural
landscapes created around polar sea ice (icescapes)
are remarkably long-term phenomena, often for
several hundred years (Aporta, 2009 – Fig. 2.10-4). By
adding a socio-cultural perspective and indigenous
knowledge, ice scientists broadened the IPY agenda
in sea ice research beyond its habitual focus on
ice dynamics and coupled ocean-atmosphere-ice
modeling (Druckenmiller et al., 2010; Eicken, 2010;
Eicken et al., 2009).
The introduction of Arctic peoples’ visions on
weather, climate, snow and ice patterns is another
s C I e n C e P r o g r a m 319