Introduction

Science at the Poles

One of the incentives for our project was to contribute to the current International Polar Year (IPY), which runs from March 2007-March 2009, the largest coordinated international interdisciplinary scientific program in 50 years, involving hundreds of projects with thousands of scientists from over 60 countries. ¹ The previous International Polar Year, 1957-1958, overlapped with the International Geophysical Year and also featured a huge multi-national scientific enterprise, taking place at the peak of the Cold War. Results from that program included the establishment of permanent bases in Antarctica, and international treaties on the seas, Antarctica, and space. ²

One obvious difference from the 1957-58 IPY is the substantial involvement of women as organizers, scientists, workers, adventurers, writers, and artists in current IPY projects. For example, Robin Bell, a senior research geophysicist from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, chairs the National Academies Polar Research Board and convened the international meeting in which the decision was made to implement the current IPY. ³ Numerous women have been blogging from the polar regions on public websites. ⁴

The challenge to traditional gender roles of women working as scientists and adventurers under extreme conditions is still not as common as feminists might advocate. This issue of S&F Online includes pieces by women working in and exploring polar regions, including Heidi Lim, who has just finished her fifth winter as a Physicians Assistant at the South Pole (a record for women), Daryl Xavier, who returned to school at age 48 to work on a PhD in biology in Antarctica, and Barbara Hillary, the first African-American woman to reach the North Pole—at the age of 75—and who is planning a trip to the South Pole for next year. Many of the women artists and writers included in this issue visited Antarctica through grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program and the New Zealand Artists to Antarctica Programme.

While science has been the vehicle to opening the Antarctic to women, it has also been a somewhat ambivalent force in relation to the polar regions. Science has led to renewed concern for the regions, their climates and inhabitants, including (sometimes) the peoples of the Arctic. Historically however, scientific investigation could also produce a science that is oblivious to, or even destructive of, the cultures that it encounters. Another difference from the IPY of 1957 is the current effort of organizers to pay attention to issues important to the northern indigenous communities who are most affected by climate change, including the study of indigenous knowledges in modern polar science. For example, Chris Cuomo has an extremely valuable website “Indigenous Knowledge and Science” as part of her National Science Foundation research project.

In this issue of S&F Online, Mary Simon, the president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the national organization representing Inuit in Canada, writes about how Canada is engaging in politics-as-usual in their Arctic, and ignoring the voices of—and the treaties with—native northern peoples. Chris Cuomo, Wendy Eisner and Kenneth Hinkel write about their project to study scientific questions of climate change in the Alaskan north slope while incorporating feminist epistemology and native knowledge into their research methods. They ask what we can learn by explicitly paying attention to gender.

The importance of attending to differences in approach can literally be seen, for example, in two recent and very different documentaries by Anne Aghion and Werner Herzog, both of which portray scientists at work in Antarctica. While neither directly engages gender, the films are veritable showcases of implicitly gendered methods of visualizing what science is about. Aghion’s Ice People focuses on a team of geologists as they live and work in a remote field camp. The film is paced to the rhythm of process-oriented work, its narrative center is at a remote camp where geologists search for fossils in a vast ice field using small shovels, and when they find an actual imprint of a leaf, it is filmed in real time. In her method, Aghion has followed at least the feel of fieldwork and what it is like to do the kind of science that has yielded knowledge on the history of the ice, global warming, and other major fields of Antarctic-based science.

Herzog begins his voiced-over narration complaining humorously of the NSF’s bureaucratic safety protocols that protected him well but also prevented his unrestrained access to the territory and thus to its heroic past. And indeed Herzog does seem to spend the entire film trying to get lost or blown up or caught in a natural disaster. He seems to need to experience Antarctica as still connected to heroic exploration. Yet even in his choice of historic footage from Shackleton’s days, particularly a promotional clip obviously shot on a soundstage in London, Herzog undercuts the authenticity of the very heroic past he yearns to experience himself. Unlike Aghion, who is content to see through the eyes of contemporary science as the major mode of engagement in Antarctica, Herzog engages agonistically both with Antarctic history and with the contemporary Antarctic, drained of the masculine ideal of those heroes.

1. The IPY includes numerous conferences and events, in addition to the “Gender on Ice” conference in conjunction with this issue of S&F Online. As editors, we attended three different conferences on topics related to this special issue, sometimes also presenting our own work: in Tromso, Norway (“Arctic Discourses,” February 2008); Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (“North by Degree: An International Conference on Arctic Exploration,” May 2008); and Christchurch, New Zealand (“Imagining Antarctica,” September 2008).[↑]
2. For a recent review of the IPY, see: Christy Collis and Klaus Dobbs. “Assault on the unknown: the historical and political geographies of the International Geophysical Year (1957-58).” Journal of Historical Geography. 34.4 (2008): 555-573. The launch of Sputnik was also part of the International Geophysical Year.[↑]
3. The ice itself is a medium of information; climatologists and geologists go to the Arctic and Antarctic searching for data regarding Earth’s history and study ice sheets and rock formations that provide archives of past climates. Robin Bell is currently in an Antarctic field camp as co-leader of a large international project to study a mountain range several miles under the ice. She also directs an ADVANCE program for women in science at Columbia University’s Earth Institute.[↑]
4. See: “Ice Stories: Dispatches from Polar Scientists”. [↑]