The International Polar Year.

Change is ubiquitous in Earth's history, and evidence is clear that Earth's climate is changing rapidly now. The Arctic ice cover is melting, ice shelves in Antarctica are crumbling, glaciers in temperate regions are disappearing, some ecosystems are changing, and permafrost thawing is causing the collapse of roads, buildings, and pipelines. The polar regions also continue to loom large in facilitating our understanding of the processes by which solar activity may seriously disturb Earth's space environment, affecting the performance of modern technologies deployed in space and on Earth. Plans are under way for the International Polar Year (IPY), 2007-2008. Previous IPYs and the International Geophysical Year, 1957-1958, produced unprecedented exploration and discoveries in many fields of research and fundamentally changed how science was conducted in the polar regions.