What have been the key results discovered during International Polar Year?
We look at the last IPY, the IGY [International Geophysical Year 1957-1958], and they can probably show Earth-shattering discoveries – the radiation belt, the first estimates for the thickness of the Antarctic ice sheet, and so on. They were clearly in discovery mode. We have a system that we think we have probably discovered the major components of but now they're changing in an intricate and complex way. Our discoveries are more a system-level understanding rather than a singular discovery of, say, a new mountain range under Eastern Antarctica. We actually know that mountain range is there; the question now is what was its role in the initial ice formation on the continent, what is its role in the current sustained ice accumulation rate?
It's a slightly different context. The thing I'm very happy about, what we hoped for but you never really know until it happens, is the interdisciplinary aspect. There's a paper out looking at deep sea octopus, well why does International Polar Year care? It turns out that deep sea octopus started around Antarctica, when it first became cold, and their distribution is probably controlled by the production of cold water northward from Antarctic. So this hints at Antarctica and the Southern Ocean not only as important in the climate system and the carbon cycle but also as a biodiversity centre. Nobody is going to get their name on a new mountain peak because of that work, but you start to see us understanding how the north and the south are connected, how what happened in the past set up the conditions for what we see today, how if that global ocean circulation changes it will affect biogeography.
The last IPY, the IGY …was clearly in discovery mode. We're working in a slightly different context. David Carlson
That's one example and there are several others that are showing us the complexity of the system and how it works together. I think that as those results come out of IPY – and we'll see more and more of them – that gets us out of this sort of home run mentality. Did you discover something you can hang your reputation on? That’s not the right mentality. It's do we at the end of the day – and the end of the day will take years of science and analysis and integration – do we understand the system better, have we discovered these marvellous complexities and interactions between the physical systems and the biological systems, and are we able to build that into a predictive skill? That's a different context to "what’s there and how do we name it?".
What have been the major challenges?
The rise in fuel costs has certainly slowed IPY down. All the institutions that have icebreakers have had to buy fuel at the prices six months ago and so there are fewer days of research or they shift something they were going to do this year to next year. It actually affects all Antarctic research because all the fuel that comes in is shipped in. The research will get done, the investigators will eventually get their deployments, but they may be 12 months late.
The rise in fuel costs has certainly slowed IPY down. David Carlson
From an individual researcher’s point of view it may be discouraging but it's the normal pattern of polar logistics – ice gets in the way or fuel price gets in the way… From IPY's point of view when we're trying to do a synoptic look at things, get all the ships there at one time and all the traverses going at one time, it erodes that. We'll wait to see how the science comes out. If we had a goal of really getting a look at the Antarctic’s Southern Ocean from all directions and we lose one of those – and fair enough for logistics reasons we could have lost one anyway – but if we lose one because the fuel prices have limited ship operations then that’s discouraging.
What’s gone better than you expected?
The political co-operation both in the Arctic and the Antarctic has been remarkable. While the same countries in the south are squabbling about all sorts of other issues in the southern capitals – by southern I mean "not Arctic" – we've got scientists working side by side on the ships, we've got improved access, reduced tariffs, cooperation on forecasting, nice cooperation at the Antarctic bases, and the ship operators looking out for each others' wellbeing. To a certain extent that happens all the time because it's a requirement of polar research but there have been some barriers to it and we identified those going in. At least momentarily we have lowered those barriers. Whether we have permanently erased onerous requirements and extraordinary tariffs is another matter.
We have also done very well at attracting the interest of young researchers. The number of graduate students working on IPY projects with IPY funding is in the thousands, for postdocs it's in the hundreds. One of our goals was to attract the best and brightest of the future researchers – we've absolutely done that. The flipside of that is where are the jobs for those people? Have we excited a new generation that's merely going to be disappointed?
Our message right now to the polar funding and polar research organisations is you need to be thinking about your workforce and how you’re going to engage, recruit and retain them. I'm not saying every one of them is going to get a job in polar research but we’d better do well by a large portion of this group because we certainly have attracted them to polar science.
That's a success problem. We’re asking these people to invest their career in the polar area; will they have the infrastructure, will the polar area continue to have the high attention it has now? It’s not strictly a question of funding ‐ funding will get you the job but keeping that person in the job and happy with the career options is a longer term issue. Most of those new researchers are highly interdisciplinary. The job market is strongly disciplinary – if that would change that would be a good job of IPY. Having done a good job of the recruitment side and doing a very good job of the training side, now we'd better think about the retention side.
IPY is drawing to a close, what happens now?
We did a celebration to mark the end of the formal two-year period in February 2009. We’re deliberately calling it a celebration because a lot of the research is ongoing; Canada, the US, Denmark, a lot of countries still have research with an IPY label. We don’t want to say anything about IPY ending if we’ve still got that research going on.
The other reason is that if you look at the polar systems – ecosystems, ice systems, oceanographic systems – if anything the questions that we had going into IPY are more urgent today than they were 24 months ago. The next two years will be critical but we'll see if IPY has done what it hoped to do, which is to raise the overall level of polar research, in terms of funding and public attention. Certainly in the short term we’ve done that, whether we can sustain that is the challenge for us.
The enthusiasm has built on volunteer networks around the world – teacher, artist, media, science museum networks. IPY is a good reason for them to get initially interested; what they're hungry for is fresh scientific information especially if it’s relevant to the polar regions or to climate. If we can continue to feed them that information I think that will continue to grow.
One of our goals was to attract the best and brightest of the future researchers – we've absolutely done that. The flipside of that is where are the jobs for those people? David Carlson
But IPY itself is going to close so we need to find a partner. Maybe it's a science organization or a funding agency that sees it's in their national interest, but we’d like to keep it international. That's the challenge because we established this international office on a one time basis and they did some good things – which international organization has the time and resources to keep that going?
And what will happen to the scientific knowledge collected during IPY?
The normal science process is almost linear – you put dollars in, you get publications out. That will happen. Students will write their theses, students and their advisors will submit their publications, their publications will go on the shelf.
In this IPY there are two reasons to do better than that, to feel dissatisfied if that's our only product. One is the external reality that the next IPCC AR5 will come out fairly soon – they’re going to have publication deadlines in 2010 or 2011. Most of us in polar science feel that the previous IPCC assessment was not able to deal effectively with polar issues. But most of us realise that it was not their fault, it was our fault. We did not have the answers that could have better informed the polar chapters of that report.
If we take the normal sequence of publication, assessment etc., it's not going to be fast enough for AR5 so we have to push that process. David Carlson
Our response post-IPY is to make sure that as much as possible what we learn and do gets into a form that is both useful and prominent in AR5. If we take the normal sequence of publication, assessment etc., it’s not going to be fast enough for AR5 so we have to push that process.
In the north, we have several assessments underway right now – one on permafrost, one on sea ice, and one on ice sheets. Even though they're going to follow the same rigorous standards, the work has to be published and we have to do it internationally, with accepted assessment etc. In a normal mode we would wait 12 months but we're deliberately pushing them now so we can get material ready for IPCC AR5.
So that's the external reality. The internal reality is we've said we were going to work in an interdisciplinary way. If you're looking at bird health, the veterinarians are going to work with the toxicologists, the meteorologists, the coastal ecologists and so on. But that takes effort. To get out of your comfort zone and into this interdisciplinary mode, you have to change your own behaviour a little bit. Left without the motivation which IPY provides we’ll just relax back into our disciplines.
It's too early to say but I think so far the problems themselves so much require interdisciplinary research that it's functioning well. But when that set of investigators writes their next set of proposals for the long-term analysis, if that goes back into purely disciplinary ruts then we’ll have lost something.
We need to keep that issue explicit and public – we need to be talking among ourselves about how we do it. The tangible opportunity for that is our science conference in Oslo in 2010. We're deliberately trying to structure that in an interdisciplinary mode. That's not easy to do because when it comes down to the individual, they still submit their paper and they still have to gain credit for it and advance their career in their disciplinary track. I hope we do it, I'm optimistic, but it does take work.
The last IPY was 50 years ago, when will the next one be?
Fifty years is too long until the next IPY. The polar regions are changing so fast and with such consequence for the rest of the planet that we're going to need to get together again soon. Not sooner than 10 years because we won't have fully digested this IPY, but not longer than 25 years because we don’t want to lose the talent and experience of today's young researchers. Fifty years from now, you'll have to learn everything again, whereas 25 years from now the postdocs who are developing their international networks today will be the leaders of the next IPY.
So it will be somewhere within that time window depending on geopolitical events and funding, the collapse of a couple of ice sheets and public attention. If you look at the history of IPYs, the first one was 50 years but from IPY 2 to IPY 3 it was actually 25 years, so there is a precedent for this.
What state will the poles be in in, say, 25 years?
To answer that question you need to look at the places that we know from this IPY are most vulnerable. Those are the systems that are closest to the melting temperature. If it's deep ice at the south pole and the average annual temperature is -25°C, a warming of 2 °C isn’t going to have a big effect. In a millennial timescale it will have a huge effect, but on a 25-year scale it won’t. You have to find the systems in the cryosphere – both physical systems and ecosystems – that are already close to this melting temperature because those systems are going to be the ones that are going to change.
Arctic sea ice is poised at -2° C. It's getting thinner, the oceans are getting slightly warmer and the air's getting slightly warmer. You have to call that one highly vulnerable. In 25 years, sure I'll make this prediction, the Arctic in many years is ice-free in the summer. Not every year and not over the full basin, but in many years you will be able to cross the north pole in a regular ship, you won't need an icebreaker. People say "Ah, shipping!" but it's going to be highly unpredictable. Looking at the 12-15 months lead time that you need to plan a commercial route, it's possible that even though the Arctic might open every year, or every other year for a couple of years, we’re not going to have the predictive skill to actually use it from an economic point of view.
Another vulnerable system in the Arctic is the permafrost under the ocean – subsea permafrost. Land permafrost is changing a lot in the active layer at the surface but deep land permafrost is still the same – it's at -10, -12 °C and it’s going to warm gradually. In the next 25 years the vulnerable part of the permafrost is under the ocean. It again is at about -2 ° C. It's been warmed by having a warm ocean over it for hundreds of years so it’s probably also poised for some big changes.
In the Antarctic, you would say sea ice again because it's right at that freezing point, and probably the perimeter glaciers and the ice shelves. The central part of Antarctica has so much mass and it's so cold that in 25 years we may know which way it's going but we’re not going to see a big change. But the ice shelves have got warm ocean underneath them, and the sea ice is already poised at this melting temperature.
I think the physical systems will change substantially but the impact is going to be on the ecosystems. The polar organisms – krill, penguin, birds, mammals, polar bears – some of them are going to disappear. There's just nowhere further polewards, nowhere more cold for them to go, both in the north and in the south.
Which ones of them are adaptable enough to survive? Which ones are hanging on in smaller relict populations [in 25 years]? That's hard to tell right now, but you have to say that the sea ice-dependent systems, which in the north are the crustaceans, the seals, the bears and in the south are the krill, the penguins and the seals again, they're going to look a lot different. From a population biology point of view you're almost thinking of them as being pushed up the mountain. They’re going to survive in small relict populations, some of them that are more adaptable will do better. Some of those populations if they haven't disappeared, they'll be on the brink – and probably irreversibly on the brink – in 25 years.
That's the disappointing news. Even if we made rapid and drastic changes in the use of human energy, we're still going to see those changes. What we're fighting right now is that it could be much worse than that. We're not only talking about the ecosystems but there are humans that depend on those ecosystems for food, for commerce etc. Even if in the short term they can find alternative sources of food and employment, in the long term it's going to be human societies that are affected – the Arctic communities.
How has IPY interacted with Arctic communities?
There's a joke in the Arctic that in the International Geophysical Year the typical Arctic family was a family of five – two adults, two children and a sociologist. We don't want to do that again. Of our 170 projects we have 22 or 23 that are led by northern institutions. They’re often community monitoring engagements on the health of the local wildlife populations. Canada especially did a wonderful job of including indigenous concerns and partners in their proposal process. We probably have another 20 projects that are partnerships between the local public health organization and community health leaders, for example.
I think we’ve done very well in engaging them on the science. The challenge is if all of that partnership and science just results in books in southern library shelves then we won’t have brought the results back into the communities.
Partly that's why I mentioned earlier this sense of needing to get into a predictive mode, because to produce annual or seasonal forecasts of ecosystem health, snow depth, ocean currents, and fisheries fitness, you need to talk to the people who are using them. That’s a way to make our science more effective.
If you were allowed to send out just one message to IPY researchers, what would that be?
Data! That's sort of an internal joke. We established in IPY a free and open data access policy. It wasn't something we spun out of clear air, we have experience in other big programmes, especially in the climate community, of what a free and open access policy means. It means rapid sharing of data, more collaborations, more publications, better science. But even though everyone in this broad community of IPY checked the box saying "yes I agree to this policy", actually making it happen is very hard. It’s a technical problem and it’s also a behavioural problem. I send it out every month at the top of my monthly messages – "register your data".
The other message for polar researchers is that we’ve shown in IPY that we can make our science open and accessible to the public as we do it, not just when we're done and we're ready to file a report with a summary for policymakers. As we do the science, we can show our adventures, our excitement, our challenges, our failures. Because we're in the polar regions and people are interested in that, we can engage people in the process of doing our science through blogs and podcasts and YouTube and experiential learning and expeditions and all the hundreds of things that have gone on through IPY. Scientists are often frightened of that but we've shown that it works, it’s effective and in some cases it's fun.
My message to polar researchers is to stay in that public engagement mode because you need it – you're going to need your countries to continue to put resources into polar research. Rather than science being a choice between a strict science to the exclusion of an outreach function, I think we've shown that open accessible science is both good science and it's good outreach. That’s what we want to continue.
How would you like to see the polar regions protected?
There's a lot of discussion stimulated by IPY about protecting the Arctic. I’m not referring to the territorial disputes because I think we have a process to resolve that. It’s the marine ecosystems that we know we don’t protect well in any other ocean. Here we don’t even know what they are – they’ve been protected by the ice. That’s where we need to give serious consideration to some sort of interim protection that buys us time until we can develop a longer-term protection strategy. Even though we are on a change trajectory and there’s a lot about the current ice ecosystem and the future open ocean ecosystem that we don’t know, it would be a prudent scientific, political and economic strategy to take the most cautious approach to the Arctic ecosystem.
I would include the highest possible standards for any kind of exploitation. Second it would include a hiatus of the rapid exploitation of the coastal shelf marine ecosystem. We know that there are large parts of the Arctic that have never had a bottom trawl because they’ve been protected by ice. If we do nothing the economic pressures on fishermen will cause them to take a shot at an open Arctic even if it’s for just a few weeks. We need to act to prevent that.
To a certain extent the Antarctic is already under a bit of regulation. It’s not by any means bulletproof. I’m sure that out of the census work in IPY we will get some biodiversity-based protection proposals to protect certain areas, or certain areas at certain seasons when the ice is in. I can see it in the Antarctic partly because they’re working within a framework where the mechanism for such a protection is plausible. In the Arctic we don’t have that kind of basis.
Whether the protection systems in the Antarctic actually survive as the global need for protein grows will remain to be seen but at least they’ve got a framework. We don’t have the same framework in the Arctic and that’s why I think we need to take a very precautionary approach.