Signature event launches polar series

A globe signed by more than 75 of the planet’s most celebrated explorers—including Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, Robert Peary, Roald Amundsen, Richard Byrd, John Glenn and Neil Armstrong—made its way to campus Feb. 12 to help UD celebrate the International Polar Year.

During an ice storm that evening, an audience of daring souls braved Delaware’s own treacherous terrain to see Coast Guard Capt. Lawson Brigham add his signature to the American Geographical Society’s Fliers’ and Explorers’ Globe. The newest signer rewarded those attending the ceremony with the story of the 1994 scientific mission he commanded from Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf to the North Pole.

As Brigham spoke, a tall screen on the stage of the Roselle Center for the Arts hung behind him, showing pictures of the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Polar Sea barreling its way through 5-foot-thick ice at the North Pole. There were photos of crew members playing football on the ice, polar bears that Brigham had been told wouldn’t venture that far north and a whale that pushed its head through the ice to communicate with the crew.

“When we navigated the first voyage to the polar extremes of the global ocean, I knew then that it was a special event,” Brigham said. “But here we are 14 years later making it official.”

His talk and the globe-signing ceremony opened the first event in the University’s William S. Carlson International Polar Year celebrations. The core of the series will consist of a group of public lectures, to be held throughout 2008, featuring several of the world’s foremost polar authorities.

“The Carlson International Polar Year events are designed to cultivate interest in Earth’s polar regions throughout the University and beyond,” says Frederick (Fritz) Nelson, professor of geography and director of UD’s permafrost research group. The events are named for Carlson, an Arctic researcher who was president of UD from 1946-50.

“In contrast to the situation in 1882 during the first International Polar Year, it has become abundantly clear that what happens in the polar regions ultimately has very strong potential to affect the rest of the world,”Nelson says. He adds that this International Polar Year will help underscore the interconnectedness of the polar regions to the rest of the world “on a geographic scale that is truly striking.”

For more information about polar research at the University or to register for other public events in the Carlson series, visit the web site [www.udel.edu/research/polar].