Globalizing Polar Science: Reconsidering the International Polar and Geophysical Years (review)

Polar sciences grow in scope and importance in inverse relationship to glaciers and ice caps as they shrink. The frigid lands and seas that once defined remoteness are now approaching rapidly, as the antipodal zones become the premier arena for evident climate change. This book could not have arrived at a more opportune moment. A bi-polar anthology in the best sense, it repackages papers developed for a conference held in 2007 to reconsider the first two International Polar Years (IPY1, 1882–83 and IPY2, 1932–33) and the International Geophysical Year (IGY, 1957–58) in the context of the fourth (IPY4, 2007–08) then beginning. It is one of those rare volumes of conference papers that can be read profitably from cover to cover.

Geoscientific research is international in scope by definition, but most polar work has been organized through transnational scientific agencies and organizations, whose participants have been both constrained and funded by disparate national interests and objectives. The tensions and mediations between national and international agendas, and their evolution, is a major theme of the book. IPY1 and IPY2 were fifty years apart, and were divided from each other by World War I. IGY and IPY4 were also fifty years apart, and the twenty-five years between IPY2 and IGY included the vast spasm of World War II and the arrival of nuclear weapons and the cold war. Despite or possibly because of such a longue (and frigid) durée, the conveners discovered that “one of the great surprises . . . was the realization that there is no systematic overall history of the IPY and IGY” (p. 6). This volume is not that history. For those interested in such, try The History of the International Polar Years, edited by Susan Barr and Cornelia Luedecke (2011).

The large domain of scientific history represented here has been sliced and parsed by dividing the papers into five parts. The first frames the polar enterprises in the context of internationalizing science in the nineteenth century. It also features a historiography of IPYs 1 and 2 and the IGY. Part 2 presents national case studies, and part 3 presents “networked personalities and programs” particularly active in IGY. Between the two sections, the papers address the polar science histories of Sweden, Japan, China, and Germany, an attention long overdue in English-language accounts of polar science. Part 4 is entirely devoted to IGY, the polar science enterprise that dwarfed all its predecessors, and was also the first of the years to address Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. IGY was also the first of the years directed to the rest of the earth, and to space, which meant it was integral to the “space race” of the superpowers. The editors note that “[t]o date, no history has adequately addressed how the eclipse of the IGY by Sputnik has influenced how humanity remembers the equally dramatic activities of global scientific investigation” (p. 2). Part 5 is the inevitable catch-all of worthy but hard-to-classify papers, one of which, Noal Broadbent’s essay on the current historical dilemmas of the Saami (Lapps) of Sweden, points to the major deficiency of this volume.

The paper-generating conference was held in 2007, when IPY4 was under way, having been preceded by years of preparatory organization. IPY4 was distinct from all its predecessors by a focus on large-scale environmental change, human-natural systems, and, perhaps most important, research that would actually benefit the inhabitants of the polar regions. Anthropologists and other social scientists were thoroughly integrated into IPY4, whereas they had never been included in any of the previous enterprises, including IGY, which to this reviewer was actually the biggest surprise. A familiar theme in the history of polar exploration is that those (mostly white) explorers who survived their races toward the poles did so because they adopted native technologies like animal-skin parkas and...