The International and interdisciplinary IPY Polar Field School 2009 kicks off today. 24 undergraduate students from all over the world will gather at UNIS to have three weeks of lectures and field excursions, focusing on the research that has been performed during the IPY.

Text: Eva Therese Jenssen

The students will meet 25 lecturers during the course, including Dr. David Carlson from the IPY International Programme Office in Cambridge, UK to staff from all the four UNIS science departments.

The focus of the field school will be interdisciplinary – involving several of the aspects of the research performed during IPY, i.e. also the human dimension. 24 students will gather Sunday at UNIS for the start of the field school and experience the latest IPY science results, great nature, exiting field work and excursions and meet a lot of encouraged students at Svalbard in the next three weeks.

Record number of applicants

When the application deadline for the field school passed, the organizers had an amazing 297 applications from students in 50 countries.

– We were amazed at how many applications we got, says Elise Strømseng, one of the field school coordinators at UNIS.

In the end only 24 students got admission. The students come from Norway, Sweden, Great Britain, Germany, U.S.A., the Netherlands, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, Ecuador and Russia.

The International Polar Year (IPY) is a large scientific programme focused on the Arctic and the Antarctic that lasted from March 1st 2007 through March 1st 2009. Over 200 research projects, with thousands of scientists from over 60 nations examining a wide range of physical, biological and social research topics, were involved. 

A unique outreach platform

International cooperation in research, education and outreach has been a common aim for all IPY participating countries. The idea of an IPY Field School was raised during an APECS/IPY Youth conference in Stockholm, Sweden, in September 2007. The project on realizing this field school started a month later and has kept on until the present date.

The planning has been carried out by IPY Norway/UNIS representative Elise Strømseng, representatives from APECS, Elizabeth Thomas and Melissa Rohde, as well as Professor Hanne H. Christiansen from UNIS.

- The IPY Field School is fully financed thanks to IPY Norway and The University of the Arctic (UArctic). UNIS is hosting the field school and arrange it as an UNIS course worth 10 ECTS, hence UNIS is contributing with coordination, lecturers, facilities and logistics, Strømseng explains.

- The field school is meant to be a special event for internationally recruited undergraduate students – focusing on studying some of the data coming out of several IPY research projects here in Svalbard. The course will also initiate future networking of students with interests for Polar Science through APECS. This will of course be a unique opportunity for the IPY research projects to be involved in undergraduate education based on their new IPY-data. As most of the focus on education in IPY has been on the master and Ph.D. student levels, we are especially pleased with being able to offer this unique opportunity to undergraduate students also in IPY, says UNIS Professor Hanne H. Christiansen.

The field school students will have excursions and fieldwork in Adventdalen, Bjørndalen, Kapp Linné, and Barentsburg. The field school ends with presentations open to all interested of five student projects within biology, physical geography and oceanography on 2 July at UNIS.

Hanne H. Christiansen and Elise Strømseng look forward to welcoming the 24 IPY field school students. (Photo: Eva Therese Jenssen).