International Polar Year 2007–2008 - WMO

ice benchmarks included circumpolar optical imagery
for mapping thermokarst and permafrost terrain
characteristics, circumpolar snow areal extent of
snow cover, snow water equivalent, and the timing of
formation and break up of lake and river ice. Spacebased
measurements also produced observations
of the distributions of surface albedo and surface
temperature. A challenge will be to coordinate all
of these results as the basis for developing the next
generation of measurements (see several chapters in
Part 2 and Part 3).
In the human health field, current status data
sets were collected and connected. Some recent
accomplishments include an expansion of health
monitoring scope to include tuberculosis, an effort to
integrate health data collection for northern regions
of the Russian Federation and the establishment of
circumpolar working groups to focus on research
aspects of viral hepatitis, diseases caused by
Helicobacter pylor and sexually transmitted infections
(Chapter 2.11). In the social science field, a major
circumpolar overview of available ‘status’ data
called the Arctic Human Development Report (AHDR,
2004) was just completed before IPY. Following this
approach, almost every major IPY project in this field
produced data to assess the status of polar societies
and social processes. New ‘baseline’ datasets were
Fig. 5.1-3 Antarctic
Station Princess
Elisabeth, Belgium,
located at 71°57’ S
23°20’ E.
(Photo: René Robert, courtesy
International Polar
Foundation)
generated on community development; industrial
exploitation of polar resources; status of indigenous
languages and knowledge systems; cultural heritage;
and community use of local resources.
Theme 2: Quantifying and
Understanding Change
The second theme focused most explicitly on
change. It aimed to quantify and understand, past
and present environmental and human change in the
polar regions in order to improve predictions. Several
approaches were proposed to monitor and predict
environmental change, including recovering key paleo-climatic
records, documenting the physical factors
controlling past climate change, enhancing modeling
capability, and developing long-term observation systems.
Examples of specific questions to be answered included:
how are climate, environment and ecosystems
in the polar regions changing, how has polar diversity
responded to long-term changes in climate, and how
has the planet responded to multiple glacial cycles.
Insights into past climate change can be obtained
by analysis of sediment cores and by ice sheet modeling.
A frequent question has often been whether the
West Antarctic ice sheet collapsed in the past. Sediments
in the Ross Sea Antarctica, near McMurdo Sta-
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