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Poles attract attention of 50,000 unified scientists

Global warming and other threats will be studied for two years.

LONDON - More than 50,000 scientists from 63 nations turned their attention to the world's poles Monday to measure the effects of climate change, using icebreakers, satellites and submarines to study everything from the effect of solar radiation on the polar atmosphere to the exotic marine life swimming beneath the antarctic ice.

The International Polar Year unifies 228 research projects under a single umbrella, with the aim of monitoring the health of the Earth's polar regions and gauging the impact of global warming. The largest international research program in 50 years, the project officially begins Thursday and ends in March 2009 - allowing for a full cycle of polar seasons, which span two calendar years.

"Global warming is the most challenging problem that our civilization has faced," Britain's chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, said in a video played before the event's launch. He called the melting of polar ice "the canary in the coal mine for global warming."

The Polar Year is being sponsored by the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization and the International Council for Science. About $1.5-billion has been earmarked for the year's projects by various national exploration agencies, but most of the money comes from existing polar research budgets.

While the increase in resources available to explorers is modest, British scientists said the project had the potential to yield a complete picture of the threat facing the polar world - known to scientists as the cryosphere.

"What's different this year is not so much the volume of research funding, but more the coordination of research," said Eric Wolff, a British antarctic survey scientist.

Besides yielding a more complete picture of the impact of global warming, the cooperation will help tackle polar science's most vexing problems, such as the challenge of trying to quantify the amount of freshwater leaking from underneath ice sheets in Antarctica.

Other projects include the installation of an Arctic Ocean monitoring system, described as an early-warning system for climate change, and a census of the deep-sea creatures that populate the bottom of Antarctica's Southern Ocean.

Few aspects of the cryosphere will escape scrutiny. The Antarctic's lakes and mountains - some trapped under about 3 miles of ice for more than 35-million years - will be sounded. Using telescopes, balloons and spacecraft, scientists at the poles will investigate plasma and magnetic fields kicked up by the sun.

"We are now on an unsustainable path," said Corinne Le Quere, a professor at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England.

"By seeing the changes as they occur in the region where they will be occurring the fastest, the International Polar Year will provide blinding evidence of the human impact on this planet."

[Last modified February 27, 2007, 01:01:38]