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International Polar Year Maps

posted by Satri on Thursday March 01, @04:36PM   Printer-friendly   Email story  Permalink  Trackback URI  Slashdotthis  Diggthis  Del.icio.us
from the cold-webmapping dept.
Research Maps Globalization Web Mapping
The Map Room links to the Canadian International Polar Year Internet Map Server. From the International Polar year website: "The International Polar Year is a large scientific programme focused on the Arctic and the Antarctic from March 2007 to March 2009. IPY, organized through the International Council for Science (ICSU) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), is actually the fourth polar year, following those in 1882-3, 1932-3, and 1957-8."

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Application Domains: Satellites Shows Arctic Polar Route Emerges [+]
Slashdot discuss a Yahoo! News article about ESA's Envisat and EOS Aqua "showed Arctic ice cover had disappeared so much last month that a ship could sail unhindered from Europe's most northerly outpost to the North Pole itself". From the article: "Regular satellite monitoring over the last 25 years shows that the northern polar ice cover has shrunk and thinned as global temperatures have risen. But this year's images are unprecedented, and fierce storms that fragmented and scattered already thin pack ice may be to blame, the scientists believe." See last year story on the same topic. Update: 09/21 17:29 GMT by S :La Cartoteca links to a ESA article with screenshots.
Application Domains: Arctic and Antarctica Data [+]
Ogle Earth discuss the new Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica (LIMA) data available from the International Polar Year (IPY) program. APB links to a Nature article which provides more coverage: "It will be used in every discipline from biology to geology to glaciology, both to answer scientific questions and plan fieldwork in the vast unexplored tracts of Antarctica. For educators, students, and the general public, LIMA will bring to life the Antarctic continent like nothing before it." Meanwhile, The Google Earth Blog discuss an arctic ice melting animation available for Google Earth. I copied below a few related previous stories. If you're looking for geospatial data over the poles, take a look at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center.
Arctic Mapping Redraws Borders [+]
Very Spatial discuss a NatureNews article on U.S. Arctic mapping and the border conflict with Canada (and Russia). The article's introduction: "The recent push for nations to stake a claim to portions of the Arctic sea floor, where potential oil reserves are thought to lie, has thrown a spotlight on how little is known about these areas, and on new attempts to pin the geography down. Earlier this week, the United States announced that their survey of the sea floor of the Chukchi Cap, a giant underwater peninsula north of Alaska (see map), showed that the foot of its continental slope — where the continental shelf falls off into the ocean basin — is more than 100 nautical miles farther from the US coast than was previously believed." Canada's budget announced this week includes "[p]roviding $34 million over two years for geological mapping to support economic development" for the the North. See also related stories below.
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