Articles & Interviews

Sciencepoles articles look at key findings from a range of polar science and research fields. Our articles RSS feed will inform you when new articles are published on this website.

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The ABCs of the IPY 2007-2008

01.09.2006

The International Polar Year (IPY) 2007-2008 has adopted the slogan "Polar Science - Global Impact" as the IPY will be an interdisciplinary and internationally coordinated research campaign, expected to usher in a new era of polar science. The international scientific community is eagerly anticipating its start in March 2007, as…
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Time Travelling to See How Changes in the Greenhouse Effect Have Caused Changes in Climate

26.04.2006

On March 23rd, SciencePoles spoke with Dominique Raynaud from France's Laboratoire de Glaciologie et Géophysique de l'Environnement, who has worked for some time on understanding the "story of the ice" what the ice cores extracted in recent years from the polar ice are telling us about the planet's climate history.…
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Climate Change: The Essentials

21.12.2005

Climate change linked to global warming is a critical issue for polar scientists and researchers. The climate of the poles is changing faster than the rest of the world and what once seemed immutable aspects of the polar climate, such as Arctic sea ice at the North Pole, are now…
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Atmospheric Circulation

08.06.2005

Atmospheric circulation is one of the key factors driving regional changes in wind, temperature, precipitation, moisture and other climatic variables. This large-scale movement of air (together with ocean circulation) is the means by which heat is distributed across the Earth's surface, particularly northward from the equator towards the poles. Without…
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The Greenhouse Phenomenon and Climatic Feedback

24.05.2005

The composition of the atmosphere imprisoned in polar ice informs researchers about the glacial and interglacial episodes which our planet has experienced, including how greenhouse gases, such as CO2 and CH4, are involved in these processes as part of a feedback loop.
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Ozone Story

24.05.2005

The discovery of a hole in the zone layer goes back to the 1980s. It was in the Antarctic that the first ground measurements of ozone levels produced some surprising results. As early as 1985, Joseph Farman, from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), published the results of his observations in…
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Satellites at the Service of Polar Research

24.05.2005

Satellites have become essential tools for polar research. For example, they track the movements of many birds and mammals at the poles. But they have proved particularly decisive when observing climate change; spatial teledetection has enabled study of changes to the extent of pack ice, the volume of ice caps,…
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Permanent Monitoring of the Atmosphere from Svalbard

24.05.2005

Greenhouse gases, organic and inorganic pollutants, aerosol... In order to study climate change, account must be taken of a great many parameters, one of the most important being the rapid evolution in the quality of our atmosphere.
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IceCube: Antarctica’s Crystal Ball

24.05.2005

Buried deep within the East Antarctic ice sheet at the South Pole, a giant high-energy neutrino observatory due for completion in 2009 could provide scientists including from Europe with an unprecedented window to the Universe, as well as a means to answer some of the most fundamental questions of astrophysics…