IPY 2007–2008628 Epilogue

A product of the 50-year cycle of its parent initiatives, IPY 2007–2008 could not have happened at a more opportune time. It was shaped by three developments during the preceding decade: (1) scientific and public anxiety about rapid climate and global environmental change, which was having a faster and larger effect in the polar regions than elsewhere; (2) the successful experiences of many multi-disciplinary science programs of the 1990s and early 2000s (WCRP, IGBP, ACIA and others); and (3) widespread longing for a seminal new initiative to re-energize the polar science community, international organizations, and agencies in charge of planning, funding, and capacity building in polar research 50 years after the very successful IGY 1957– 1958. These and other factors conjoined in 2001–2002, at the very time when polar scientists started talking about how to celebrate the 50th anniversary of IGY 1957–1958. Those early talks about a commemorative ‘IGY+50 ’ event quickly evolved into planning for a new Polar Year. The rest is history. IPY 2007–2008, whose actual chronology started in 2001–2002, developed into what some have called the largest internationally coordinated planetary research effort of the past 50 years. It marshaled the intellectual resources of thousands of scientists from an unprecedented number of fields and from more than sixty nations. It has already advanced our understanding of the complexities of the polar regions and of the range of global linkages, geophysical, biological, and societal, of polar processes. IPY 2007– Lead Authors