By Stephen Leahy
TORONTO, Jan 23 2007 (IPS)

The recent collapse of a Canadian Arctic ice shelf illustrates why Canada is the biggest contributor to the International Polar Year, reportedly the largest global scientific research programme, focused on climate change.

More than 60 nations, from Chile to China, and 50,000 scientists and researchers will be involved in the International Polar Year (IPY) 2007-2008, actually the period from Mar. 1, 2007 to the same date in 2009.

Canadian scientists recently reported the collapse of the Ayles Ice Shelf, one of only six ice shelves left in Canada. At 66 square kilometres and 40 metres thick, Canada’s new ice island is small compared with the collapse of giant Antarctic ice shelves such as Larsen B, an area of 2,700 square km which broke off in 2002. However the 3,000- to 4,500-year-old Ayles shelf is the largest collapse in 25 years.

Rather than large events, Arctic ice shelves have been quietly falling apart in small pieces, and are 90 percent smaller than 100 years ago.

The IPY will study the Arctic and Antarctic regions, focusing on the effects of global warming produced by greenhouse gases. It has a budget of more than 500 million dollars, to which Canada contributed 160 million.

“The rates of change in the polar regions are accelerating. These regions are experiencing the impacts of climate change first, so it’s important to know what is happening to learn how we can adapt,” biologist David Hik, chairman of IPY Canada, told Tierramérica.

“The global climate system is a balance between the cold regions and the warm regions of the planet,” David Carlson, director of the International Polar Year Programme Office, told Tierramérica in an interview from Cambridge, England.

Changes in these cold regions affect global weather patterns which have a major impact on the well-being of the rest of the planet, he said.

The last major international effort to study the world’s coldest regions took place 50 years ago and was called the International Geophysical Year. It was a landmark scientific collaboration involving 67 nations that produced data still used today.

That was an era of exploration and discovery of remote and forbidding regions of the world that had changed little in millions of years.

IPY scientists today feel an urgency to understand the linkages between changing polar ice, oceans and permafrost and the rest of the planet because of the potentially massive impacts, said Carlson.

For that reason even non-polar countries like China and Malaysia are participating in the IPY. And since this is the largest international scientific project in 50 years, it is a major opportunity for scientific collaboration.

The IPY is organised by the International Science Council and the World Meteorological Organisation, and sponsored by the United Nations Environment Programme.

There is also a great deal of public interest resulting from wide media attention focused on polar bears, penguins and climate change. And there will also be major media interest over the next few weeks with the upcoming release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report.

The product of six years of study by 2,500 scientists from 130 nations, the IPCC report will include some new information on changes in polar ice.

IPY researchers will not only study geophysical changes, they will study the polar regions’ marine and terrestrial ecology and, in the populated Arctic, social and economic issues.

“There are also four million people living the Arctic region who are already on the forefront of changing conditions that will affect the rest of the planet,” said Carlson.

Economic changes are also having a major impact in the region as warming weather, combined with rising prices for resources like oil, gas and minerals, have turned parts of the Arctic region into the fastest growing communities in Canada, according to Hik.

“In just 15 years, Canada’s north has become one of the world’s biggest diamond producers,” he pointed out.

The Arctic basin potentially has 25 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas reserves. Despite the still harsh conditions, exploration and development is booming throughout the region. A 10-billion-dollar pipeline from the Arctic Ocean and through Canada’s Mackenzie Valley to bring natural gas south is in the final planning stages, he said.

Environmental groups have criticised U.S. IPY research projects that collaborate with oil companies to hunt for fossil fuel reserves in the Arctic.

“We’re already approaching a critical threshold of global warming… and the seeking out of further oil and gas deposits is going to make that problem worse,” Tony Juniper, British director of Friends of the Earth, told the Associated Press last April.

International treaties prevent economic exploitation of resources in the Antarctic. However the reality in the Arctic is that “one day in the future there might be an oil rig sitting on top of the North Pole” said Hik.

(*Originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Environment Programme.)

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