03/12/07 International Polar Year

The International Polar Year - the scientific campaign to improve human understanding of the critical role of Polar Regions in global biological systems and to engage the public in polar discovery - has officially started. At the kick-off conference - a panel of polar scientists presented an overview of expeditions that will take place at both the North and South Poles. The panel included government leaders from the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Department of the Interior. Deputy Secretary of the Interior Lynn Scarlett remarked that while Polar Regions are remote from human populations - they are not remote in their relevance. She says each change affects other biological systems. SCARLETT: We have ice shelves thinning and retreating, permafrost thawing, sea ice decreasing. The changes set in motion a sequence of other changes; migration of animals on land and at sea. These changes in turn affect coastal Alaskan villages and human infrastructure. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Geological Survey will study how the future of Arctic animals and ecosystems are linked to the fate of the Arctic ice pack. USGS Director Mark Myers - who has spent much of his professional scientific career in the Arctic and Antarctic - says a key area of focus will be glaciers. MYERS: Glaciers are clearly the good benchmark, the sentinel of climate change. They're also the mine of data, repository data on historical climate change where we can gather 100-thousand years or more of data, historical data. It's incredibly credibly valuable toward understanding the changes that we are seeing so good focus on glaciers. Myers says sharing the information with universities and other organizations will be very important to make the International Polar Year a success. Therefore - much of the data will be made available on the Web. One of the studies - according to Myers - will be to determine the amount of petroleum in the Arctic. MYERS: We're going to do and artic petroleum assessment. In the year 2000 the USGS did a global assessment which placed a large percentage of the remaining petroleum reserves in the arctic region so we're going to refine that greatly. The work started in 2003 and that will be completed in the International Polar Year. This is actually the fourth polar year. The first was in 1882. A web cast of the event with a video on the vision for International Polar Year can be accessed from U.S. government's International Polar Year website at www dot ipy dot gov. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.