The International Polar Year: Celebrating the Sublime Spectacle of International Research
BY KRISTIN LARSON
Though they may be enemies in all else, here they are to be friends. So wrote Commander Maury, a mid - 19th - century American naval officer and meteorologist who saw clearly that the destinies of mankind were influenced by forces of nature extending far beyond any one nation’s range of observation. He proposed a “sublime spectacle” of international research that would enjoy diplomatic immunity similar to that accorded early exploring ships by men-of-war. Maury reasoned that the knowledge gained would create not only a holistic understanding of the processes influencing the earth—its jet Celebrating the Sublime Spectacle of International Research Polar Year streams, solar flux, magnetic storms, ocean pump, and low pressures—but also would create bonds transcending political animosities. During this same period, the pervasive influence of polar regions on these large Earth systems became increasingly clear. Of all the locations on Earth, research in the high latitudes demanded cooperation and sharing of logistical burdens. Maury’s vision ultimately took shape several decades later as the International Polar Year (IPY) in 1882, the first in a series of four highly significant international scientific collaborations, including its progeny - IPY set to commence this March.
Explorers Club members have consistently been major contributors to IPY expeditions. In fact, two of the Club’s earliest presidents played dramatic roles in the first IPY and brought back (just barely) scientific data from the high Arctic that is now considered of vital importance. Happily, these high-latitude expeditions seem always to beget more of that ilk, and the first IPY set a hallowed precedent upon which Club members have continued to pile impressive polar records. The coming IPY presents The Explorers Club with an opportunity to be reacquainted with its polar heritage and to celebrate the Club’s key contributions to polar- regions research and exploration.
Building on Maury’s proposals, the first IPY was championed primarily by distinguished polar explorers. Foremost among them was Karl Weyprecht, an Austrian, who had observed the influence of Arctic weather patterns on temperate latitudes. In addition to their interest in scientific collaboration, European communities were also motivated by the consolidation of political power under the Hapsburg Empire, believing that the emphasis of government- sponsored expeditions should be realigned to scientific pursuits rather than raw conquest and territorial claims. Despite delays caused by regional wars and Weyprecht’s untimely death, the first IPY got underway in August 1882 with a total of 14 observatories supported by 11 nations, including American stations at Point Barrow, Alaska, and on Ellesmere Island. Excitement in the scientific community was pitched, and preparations were feverish. The potential for a burst of new data that could be shared in relatively real time using the recently expanded telegraph system held endless promise in the eyes of scientists.
Into this grand scientific adventure stepped Lt. Adolphus W. Greely, commander of the IPY Lady Franklin Bay Expedition, which was to establish the northernmost IPY observatory on Ellesmere Island. Lt. Greely’s crew of 25 men, including two Inuits, settled into Fort Conger on the northern end of Ellesmere Island in August 1881 and immediately commenced their observations of auroras, magnetism, gravity, weather, geography, and biology. In April 1882, Sgt. David L. Brainard, second in command of the expedition, along with Lt. James B. Lockwood and Frederik T. Christiansen (an Inuit), reached latitude 83° 24' N, setting a new “farthest north” record. The previous record had been held by British explorers for nearly 300 years. The expedition took a tragic turn when relief ships failed to reach the party during the summers of 1882 and 1883. On the basis of pre-arranged orders, Greely then led his men south in the fall of 1883 to Cape Sabine, where they established a new camp.When relief finally came, most of the men had died of starvation, leaving only six survivors, including Greely and Brainard, along with their precious trove of IPY data.
Until very recently, the important scientific accomplishments of the IPY Lady Franklin Bay Expedition were overshadowed by its tragedies. However, the legacies created there have grown stronger with time. The data collected at Fort Conger is now considered to be a key environmental baseline by many international scientific organizations, particularly as questions of climate change come under increasing scrutiny. This year, scientists venturing into the Arctic under the auspices of the 2007 IPY will rely on the Lady Franklin Bay data set—a full 125 years later.
Another important legacy of the IPY Lady Franklin Bay Expedition was the formation of The Explorers Club in 1904. Adolphus Greely was the Club’s first president, and David Brainard was its fourth. The two intervening presidents — Cook and Peary—were also well known in polar circles. Thus, from its very inception, scientific exploration in polar regions formed a vital part of the Club’s DNA, and all but one of the Club’s first seven presidents were major polar explorers. Today, the total number of terms served by “polar presidents” represents more than 20 percent of the Club’s presidential roster!
New tools developed and refined in the first decades of the twentieth century, such as aircraft,helped the next generation of explorers build on the knowledge gained in the first IPY. By 1930, both Poles had been overflown (the North Pole by Amundsen in 1926 and the South Pole by Byrd in 1929), and a German dirigible made the first round-the-world trip carrying passengers in 1928. Added to the aviation toolbox was the emergence of radio as a key mode of communication, as well as balloons capable of carrying instrumented payloads and cameras capable of capturing auroral displays. These developments inspired a keen interest among scientific, industrial, and politically motivated factions to understand more fully upper - atmospheric physics, which was already known to exert a strong influence on radio-wave propagation, weather forecasting, and “magnetic storm” interference. Thus, 50 years after the first IPY, discussion turned to a new coordinated international scientific program aimed at synchronous measurements of global phenomena.
Preparations for the second IPY got underway in earnest in August 1930, though the plan was nearly scrubbed with the onset of the global economic depression. In the end, a scaled-back program commenced in August 1932, aided by several private grants from the Rockefeller Foundation. During the second IPY, 14 countries (12 from Europe, plus the U.S. and Canada) occupied 27 stations, mostly in the Arctic. The resulting research brought advances in meteorology, atmospheric sciences, geomagnetism, and, in particular, resulted in the mapping of ionospheric phenomena. As Walter Sullivan, leading science writer for the New York Times, noted in his seminal 1961 book, Assault on the Unknown, knowledge gained during the second IPY, as applied to radio communications alone, was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. It was also during the second IPY period that another distinguished Explorers Club member, Adm. Evelyn Byrd, established one of the first year-round, inland Antarctic research stations at Little America.
Soon after the close of the second IPY, global preoccupation turned to the Second World War, and polar exploration became increasingly politically motivated. Escalating conflicts over territorial claims in Antarctica prompted the United States to undertake the U.S. Antarctic Service Expedition in 1939, and, in 1946, the navy launched Operation Highjump, a huge multi-pronged mission advertised as being “primarily of a military nature.” Unlike many previous Antarctic expeditions, such as Byrd’s trip to Antarctica with Norman Vaughn in 1928–1930 and Finn Ronne’s RARE expedition (which included the first wintering women), military operations were supplanting private endeavors
Political maneuvering in polar regions did not end with the Second World War. Rather, it intensified, eventually triggering the Cold War in the early 1950s. During this period, the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line—a chain of radar and communication systems stretching 3,000 miles from the northwest coast of Alaska to the eastern shore of Baffin Island, all above the Arctic Circle—was installed. Maneuvers under Arctic sea ice escalated as the range and sonar capabilities of submarines improved, and military gunfire even occurred in 1952 on the Antarctic Peninsula when men of the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey (FIDS) (later the British Antarctic Survey) re-established a base near the new Argentinean Esperanza Base.
Despite international Cold War tensions, or arguably on the very basis of these tensions, nations of the world once again convened, just 25 years after the second IPY, in hopes of producing a new global scientific collaboration. Recognizing the broader scope of scientific inquiry made possible by advances in rocketry, the proposed program became known as the International Geophysical Year, or IGY, rather than the 1957 IPY, though polar-regions research remained a centerpiece of the effort. In addition to rocketry, the Second World War produced many other weapons that were being successfully employed in the post-war period in the service of scientific inquiry. For example, ten-story polyethylene balloons that could lift huge payloads more than 20 miles into the atmosphere and optical instruments capable of examining light spectra with great precision were being retooled and prepared for IGY implementation.
Fieldwork for the IGY commenced in 1955 with thedeployment of many parties to Antarctica, including the U.S. Operation Deep Freeze I personnel aboard ice breakers, cargo ships, and fuel bunkers. Their task was to set up coastal stations to serve as stepping stones into the interior. During the Austral summer of 1955–1956, the first flights connecting Antarctica with the outside world were made by four longrange navy planes, which flew from New Zealand to the newly established base at McMurdo. On October 31, 1956, a tiny navy R4D aircraft named Que Sera Sera made the first surface contact with the South Pole in the 44 years since Robert Falcon Scott had stood there abjectly aware of Roald Amundsen’s priority. Others had flown over the South Pole, but none had ever landed, thus surface conditions, temperature, and pressure altitude were complete unknowns and created pretouch- down anxiety in much the same manner as the lunar
landing just 13 years later! After this first successful air mission to 90º S, many more planes quickly followed, airdropping construction materials and delivering Navy Seabees and civilian scientists to the South Pole in preparation for the first-ever wintering party commencing in February 1957.
The Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition was also part of the IGY. Starting in 1957,Vivian Fuchs led a motorized traverse of the Antarctic continent from a location near the Weddell Sea over more than 2,100 miles of rough sastrugi and crevasses to the Ross Sea, along the same route originally planned by Ernest Shackleton for his Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. Forty years after Shackleton’s failed attempt, the surface crossing of Antarctica remained a tantalizing “polar first,” and the activity fit nicely with the IGY’s goals of international cooperation and scientific inquiry. Concurrently with Fuchs’s traverse from the Weddell side, New Zealander
Edmund Hillary led a tractor-train from the Ross Sea side to identify a route to the South Pole. Hillary reached the Pole on January 4, 1958. Fuchs and his convoy arrived on January 19, 1958, and then pushed on to reach McMurdo Sound on March 2. This remarkable accomplishment successfully opened up vast expanses of Antarctic wilderness and proved the value of mechanized support in polar regions. Indeed, Fuchs attributed much of the expedition’s success to the use of motorized transport and particularly to the expedition aircraft used to reconnoiter not only clear routes in the sea ice and initial landing sites, but also to assist with route-finding along the crevassed traverse route.
Not all IGY activities occurred on land. Space was also a new scientific frontier that became accessible for the first time during the IGY with the Soviet’s successful launch of the Sputnik satellite on October 4, 1957. This was followed shortly by the U.S. satellite Discovery I. By the end of the IGY, there had been 21 attempted satellite launches, three by the Soviets (all successful) and 18 by the United States, of which five achieved their announced objective. The oceans of the world were also being studied. Surface ships crisscrossing the major oceans collected a full range of biogeochemical information, including key data from Antarctic waters by Bill Littlewood, one of The Explorers Club’s longest-serving members. As senior oceanographer for the U.S. Navy, Bill participated in and helped direct the four-year Deep Freeze oceanographic program in the Ross and Weddell Seas. Additionally, soundings of the world’s oceans taken during the IGY were revealing astonishing new information about the physical features of the deep ocean floor, such as seismically active rifts. Shortly after the IGY, Jacques Piccard, accompanied by Don Walsh, reached the deepest point in the ocean in Piccard’s bathyscaphe Trieste.
The IGY program shed light on nearly every conceivable area of technical inquiry. This coordinated program has since been described as the greatest example of worldwide scientific cooperation in the history of the human race, and “the single most significant peaceful activity of mankind since the Renaissance and the Copernican Revolution.”2 As a result of the IGY, the world grew closer, and perhaps a bit smaller in terms of international relations. But it also grew larger in terms of the scientific horizons opened up by the astounding volume and quality of scientific work completed by thousands of dedicated scientists worldwide. The legacies of the IGY are too numerous to account for here, but one abiding achievement exemplifies the spirit of the IGY as no other: the Antarctic Treaty. This masterful agreement, which has served as a model for many subsequent treaties, was opened for signature on December 1, 1959, and officially entered into force on June 23, 1961. The Treaty’s original signatories were the 12 countries active in Antarctica during the IGY, and its first few articles enshrine all that was great about the IGY: setting aside the entire Antarctic continent for peaceful purposes only; prohibiting military activity, such as weapons testing; and ensuring unfettered freedom of scientific investigation and cooperation, and freely exchanging information and personnel. It is a testimony not only to the treaty instrument itself but to the will of the Antarctic Treaty parties that it remains today as a robust touchstone in the face of pressures presented by resource extraction, tourism, and increasingly ambitious scientific goals.
A new IPY will commence in March of 2007. Currently more than 50,000 people representing more than 60 countries are involved, and more than 225 fully endorsed scientific proposals have been accepted by the joint governing committee composed of the World Meteorology Organization and the International Council for Sciences. As with past polar/geophysical years, considerable emphasis during the coming IPY will be placed on the study of large Earth systems. However, a significant new development is influencing the scope of study, and that is the now well-documented capacity of humans to perturb these Earth systems. Starting with the discovery of depleted ozone over both poles in the mid-1980s, the Antarctic ozone hole became the “poster child” for global-scale human impacts, an awareness that is now even more acute and urgent. Thus, during the upcoming IPY, traditional measurements of meteorology and climate will be augmented by new ones aimed at developing a predictive understanding of the changes now occurring in polar environments and discerning linkages between these changes and global processes as a whole. Another important goal of the new IPY will be to assess the societal impacts that these changes will have, especially on native cultures.
IPY events have shown us that polar places are important to our collective understanding of the larger systems that influence all aspects of our world. It is because of polar research that we now understand the interconnectedness of oceans, air, and sunspots, and it was polar regions that first alerted us to our own capacity for altering the global environment. We now know that the huge “ice cubes” at both our poles are actually exquisitely sensitive to changes in global conditions and provide records that can be used to reconstruct an uninterrupted and detailed climate record extending over hundreds of thousands of years.
Through research and exploration we also know that polar regions are important culturally as well. It is one thing for us to inhabit the temperate zones and make excursions into the high latitudes, but it’s another matter entirely for those humans that have evolved over thousands of years in the most rugged conditions possible. These cultures have not only survived but have thrived, as evidenced by their elaborate traditions and creative expressions. The cultures of the Arctic demonstrate the extremes of human adaptation. Polar places are thus important because they provide tangible evidence of our resilience and creativity as a human race.
In short, the high latitudes feed our collective imagination and allow us to test ourselves against some of Earth’s most extreme environments. As author Wallace Stegner wrote, we need wilderness because: [It is] the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. . . .The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health, even if we never once set foot in it. . . . It is important because it is there . . . simply as an idea.
And nowhere on Earth are the values of wilderness more apparent and untamed than in the polar regions. The scientific, cultural, and exploration opportunities offered by these places of “wondrous cold” lie at the core of, and stimulate the essential mission of, The Explorers Club. In this context it is not surprising that the Club’s history closely parallels that of the IPYs: legacies that have been both a benefit to and a beneficiary of each other’s traditions.