The fostering of cross-disciplinary science as a result of the IPY: “connectivity” created by the Canada Three Oceans project

Abstract

The fourth International Polar Year (IPY), which ended in March 2009, represented a ca. 50% increase in the funding of polar science, a major expansion of the observing effort across polar and subpolar seas, the deployment of a wide range of new and complex observing techniques and a gratifying new degree of international collaboration in their use. As a result, the IPY has revolutionized our polar data sets to provide our first real glimpse of the ocean–atmosphere–cryosphere operating as a complete system. Here we focus on one particular aspect of the emerging results—the “connectivities” that may develop between individual research projects over time, developing the complexity of our understanding in real if unexpected ways as new findings emerge, ramify and mesh within projects or between them. For simplicity, we illustrate this valuable but unpredictable process by using one particular Arctic–sub-Arctic project—Canada Three Oceans—as our initial reference point and attempting to trace out a small subset of its inter-connections across space, time, projects and disciplines.

Keywords

• International Polar Year
• connectivity
• downscaling
• northern seas
• climate change
• international collaboration