Welcome to Ice Stories: Dispatches from Polar Scientists, where you’ll meet penguin biologists, glaciologists, cosmologists, geologists, and marine scientists working in Antarctica and the Arctic. We gave them cameras and blogging tools and asked them to document their adventures, so you can learn more about their research in their archived blog posts, photos, videos, and Webcasts. This experiment, in celebration of the International Polar Year (2007-08), was our effort to give an up-close-and-personal look at research in extreme environments through the thoughts and experiences of the scientists working there.

The adventure began in Antarctica in November 2007 with a series of Webcasts from the South Pole and the McMurdo and Palmer research stations. It continued for two years, shifting polar locations to the Arctic in summer 2008. In winter 2008-09, we returned to Antarctica. Explore the site and see what it’s really like to be a research scientist at the top or bottom of the world.