Scientists together in the cold - Antarctica: Global Science from a Frozen Continent - page 254

of the first satellite, Sputnik-1, on 4 October 1957 - which stimulated the space race

and the US Moon programme.
During the IGY, the International Council of Scienti

-

now
the International Council for Science) recognised the need to continue Antarctic
collaborative research beyond the end of the IGY observing period. Three so-
called

c Unions (ICSU

were created to support this, and grew into three
Interdisciplinary Bodies of ICSU

' Special Committees '

c Committee on Oceanic
Research (SCOR), the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) and the
Scienti

- the Scienti

c Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR).
There was, of course, some international coordination in the Antarctic prior
to the IGY, starting with the 83, when

there was a French observing station on Tierra del Fuego, near Cape Horn, and a
German one on South Georgia. The several individual national expeditions to
Antarctica itself at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century
during the so-called

first International Polar Year (IPY) of 1882 -

could also be seen as part of an
international endeavour, having been stimulated by the International Geographical
Congress of 1895, which made Antarctica the main target for new exploration.
The second IPY offered an opportunity to expand upon the

' Heroic Age of Exploration '

first, but coming as

it did in 1932 33, at the height of the global economic depression, efforts were

focussed in the Arctic; those in the south were restricted to observations from
stations in South Georgia and the South Orkneys.
These various early Antarctic activities left no permanent establishments and
did not form the start of any permanent activity centred on Antarctica in the way
that the IGY did. Nor was science ready at that point for international collaboration
of the kind or on the scale that we accept as normal today.

-

The Scienti c Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR)

SCAR was born from the unanswered questions and the exciting new horizons
that the IGY opened up in the Antarctic. Charged with continuing the coordination
of scienti c activity in the Antarctic that had begun during the IGY, and with

developing a more extensive scienti c programme of circumpolar scope and

signi 5 February 1958, set out to

build on the enthusiasm and the opportunities that the new Antarctic infrastructure
could make possible. From the very beginning, the SCAR mission has been to
facilitate and coordinate Antarctic research at a pan-Antarctic level beyond that
possible by its individual national members.
What this means in practice is that SCAR helps the Antarctic scienti

cance, SCAR ' s first meeting, in The Hague on 3 -

c
community to initiate, develop, and coordinate high quality international scienti c

research on and around Antarctica, as well as investigating the role of Antarctica and