NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Middle school students, high school students, and teachers in the eastern U.S. and western Europe are invited to participate in a live, interactive videoconference hosted by polar scientists on Oct. 19, 2007. The event will take place during Earth Science Week. The broadcast will be the first of a series of videoconferences delivered via Internet2 throughout the International Polar Year.

Image to right: Each spring, Waleed Abdalati and other researchers brave the remote, cold and windy conditions on Petermann Glacier on the northern coast of Greenland to study the area. Credit: NASA

IPY is a coordinated effort by the international science and education communities to learn more about the polar regions and how they impact the rest of the world, including people. IPY actually runs for two years, from March 2007 to March 2009, to allow for two field seasons of Arctic and Antarctic research.

Earth Science Week is presented annually by the American Geological Institute to help educators, students and the public better understand and appreciate the Earth sciences, and to encourage stewardship of the Earth.

Scheduled to start at 9:30 a.m. EDT, the one-hour IPY broadcast will be shown at select science centers. The program will feature Rhian Salmon of the IPY International Program Office and Waleed Abdalati from NASA's Cryospheric Sciences Branch. Salmon will provide a short overview of IPY research and how activities in a variety of disciplines connect with each other. Abdalati will then focus on a specific area of polar research -- the extreme and changing environment of Greenland's ice sheet.

Salmon and Abdalati will respond to questions. Plans will be announced for a student project to investigate the effects of receding polar ice on Earth's albedo.

The IPY videoconference is sponsored by the Association of Science-Technology Centers, the American Geological Institute, NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the IPY International Program Office, and MAGPI, an Internet2 network service provider.

Internet2 is a consortium led by more than 200 universities in partnership with industry and government to develop and deploy advanced network applications and technologies.

For details about host science centers and instructions on how to register and attend, stay tuned to http://www.earthsciweek.org and http://www.astc.org/iglo.


Dan Stillman, Institute for Global Environmental Strategies