Geoscience Reference
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international coordination of research and enhance international collaboration and
cooperation in polar regions. Interdisciplinary approaches would be emphasised to
address questions and issues lying beyond the scope of individual disciplines. The
timing was thought to be especially appropriate given the rapidly accumulating signs
that global warming was having its most powerful effect in the polar regions, where
there was ample evidence for shrinking sea ice, melting permafrost and retreating
glaciers.
SCAR played a major role in stimulating the international consensus for the
IPY and helping to organise it. The idea of celebrating the 50th anniversary of the
IGY and the 125th anniversary of the
first IPY arose in 1999. In 2002 SCAR
Delegates supported the proposal and suggested that enquiries should be made to
ICSU and IUGG. SCAR Vice-President Professor C. G. Rapley agreed to follow up
this proposal. After the US National Academy of Sciences con
rmed its feasibility
through an international workshop, Robin Bell (United States) and Chris Rapley
(UK) jointly presented ICSU with a proposal. Following the report of the ICSU
Planning Group in 2004, ICSU agreed that WMO should become a co-sponsor
in organising the IPY. The two organisations formed a Joint Committee to steer the
process, and an international programme of
ce was established at the British
Antarctic Survey in Cambridge to manage the process.
The IPY projects can be reviewed on the IPY web site at
www.ipy.org
. Not only
were most endorsed IPY projects strongly internationally collaborative and
interdisciplinary, they were also cross-thematic, most being targeted at more than
one of the IPY science themes. The international nature of the individual projects,
and their common interdisciplinary nature, were further departures from the IGY
and previous Polar Years, where single discipline science projects tended to be
effected by single nations. This broad international effort should contribute to a
future of increased cooperation between scientists, organisations and nations in
the knowledge and rational use of our planet.
SCAR began contributing as an observer to the meetings of the IPY Planning
Committee, starting in March 2004, and encouraged its scienti
c community to
contribute proposals to the IPY steering committee. As a result, all of SCAR
'
slarge
Scienti
c Research Programmes, and several of its Action and Expert Groups ended up
leading or being much involved in programmes approved by the IPY Joint Committee.
SCAR played a key role in the IPY, wielding appropriate in
uence in the way in
which the IPY was steered. Recognising the key role of SCAR in the IPY, the Joint
Committee decided that the 2008 SCAR/IASC Open Science Conference in St
Petersburg would be the
first of three major IPY Conferences. The second in the
series addressed progress at the end of the IPY, and took place in Oslo, Norway,
from 8
10 June 2010. The third will review the implications of science for policy
makers, and will take place in Montreal, Canada, in 2012. SCAR expects to take on a
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