It is poetic justice, it seems, that I should be jotting this note for an issue
on polar region research amidst an early winter deep freeze here in New England.
And this just 45 years after my callow bid to join the International Geophysical
Year, which went on to pioneering polar work without me.
We highlight this month some of the dramatic research that follows on the heels
of that ice-breaking period of polar studies. Now the research is
in pursuit of an understanding that was hardly discussed at that time: global
The Arctic region is a good place to start in understanding climate change. In
our second feature, Investigating the Paleoclimate of an Arctic Gateway,
Julie Brigham-Grette, Lloyd Keigwin, and Neal Driscoll describe the 2002 ocean
drilling and geophysical research cruises into the Bearing Sea and Chukchi Sea,
which had previously defied such exploration because of drift ice. The recently
commissioned U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Healy, equipped to be a research vessel,
allowed scientists to take drill cores of the seafloor sediments, which are now
under intense study. The authors describe how these cores and sediment profiles
will drive the paleoclimatic research out of solely regional climatic studies
and into the realm of global feedbacks and interhemispherical connections. The
Bering Land Bridge serves at times as a continent and at times as an ocean gateway,
producing a geographic bottleneck to the migration of terrestrial and marine biota,
The ice-free McMurdo Dry Valleys region of Antarctica provides a striking contrast
to the Arctic and the rest of the Antarctic, as described by Berry Lyons in Research
in the Coldest Desert. This area of the perennially frozen lakes is dry,
and without sunlight for months at a time. In this extreme environment, a team
of scientists working on a National Science Foundation Long-term Ecological Research
site are investigating how a polar desert ecosystem functions, particularly how
photosynthetic organisms adapt and survive through the austral winter.
Perhaps only here would an earth scientist find himself the lead investigator
of a project focused on ecology and the synthesis and integration of biological
and physical sciences as the biogeosciences, as Berry Lyons has.
Our final three stories are from our Geotimes staffers. Lisa Pinsker, who wrote
Deciphering Earths Dicey Dipole, describes current research
on Earths magnetic field. Many researchers go right to the poles to find
clues of the magnetic fields past. In contrast to simplistic characterizations
of the past, the field experiences complex rates of change in intensity and polarity
that may have imprinted the rock record with decipherable information on physical
and even climatic conditions.
Christina Reed serves up the ultimate contrasts diamonds, fire and ice,
and noble gases in her piece Meteorites on Ice. It so happens
that most of the meteorites on Earth have been found in Antarctica. Collections
of these tiny extraterrestrials are providing insights into the compositions and
history of celestial bodies, which ultimately tell us more about ourselves.
In An Expanding View of Polar Ice Sheets, Greg Peterson describes
the important climatic link between ice sheets and sea level. Focusing on Antarctica
and Greenland, Peterson writes: If the two sheets melted completely, they
would raise sea level by almost 70 meters. Research, relying on enhanced
satellite technologies, is determining changes over time in ice-sheet thickness
and rates of flow, in response to perturbations of the multitude of microclimates
in these regions. Early results suggest that even Antarctic glaciers respond
to changes in climate on a time scale of decades, not in hundreds or thousands
The studies featured in this issue share some remote geography, but otherwise
are quite different in the foci and methods of their research. Those centered
on climate change and ultimately on developing predictions related thereto
illuminate the fascinating way diverse fields of earth science tease out
proxies for climate change and reweave them, as in series of simultaneous equations
or coded double helixes, so as to understand how it did happen and predict how
it will happen.
Believe your compass and bundle up,
Samuel S. Adams