It was Carl Weyprecht, an Austrian naval lieutenant, who tirelessly inspired geophysicists around the world and stressed the need for simultaneous observations of polar geophysical phenomena, after he returned from his arctic expedition in 1874. His proposal became reality as the First International Polar Year (1882-1883), although he did not live to see it.

The International Polar Conference met in St. Petersburg in 1881, and decided to make geographical observations at 12 sites, including Point Barrow. The observations conducted at each station were the determination of position, tides, auroras, meteorological observations, and magnetic observations.

The Barrow Observatory hut still stands there today.

A Second International Polar Year (1929-1930) was proposed soon after the Great Depression. There was a general feeling the project should be delayed indefinitely.

However, it was the strong urge of D. La Cour that made the Second International Polar Year possible. The Rockefeller Foundation provided a grant of $40,000 for the instrumentation.

More than 30 magnetometer stations were added and 16 ionospheric sounder stations were operating during the Second Polar Year. An ionospheric sounder, the facility that became the foundation of the UAF Geophysical Institute, was established in Fairbanks.

In 1950, James Van Allen, Sydney Chapman, Lloyd Berkner, and a few others considered a Third Polar Year, 25 years after the second one, which became the International Geophysical Year. At that time, geophysicists were quite eager to cooperate in major international collaboration after World War II.

Chapman became the president of the IGY and later also became the scientific director of the Geophysical Institute. In 1954, a special committee was formed by the representatives from a number of international organizations.

Thirteen working groups were also formed. Each working group made a considerable effort in standardizing instruments and in making sure the data were of high-quality. The preparation for this greatest enterprise, the IGY, was indeed monumental.

In spite of emphasizing standardization, each country was encouraged to construct its own innovative instruments. As a result, Canada, Russia, Scandinavia, and the United States developed different all-sky cameras. More than 100 cameras in the northern and southern polar regions took all-sky photographs every minute, regardless of sky conditions.

I was hired as one of the so-called "IGY hires" at the Geophysical Institute in 1958 as a graduate student under Sydney Chapman, together with (now professors emeritus) Chuck Deehr, Gene Wescott, and many others. The task of our generation was to analyze IGY data. I witnessed a glimpse of Chapman's tasks of leading the IGY effort, a very difficult undertaking. Although the IGY days were like the Stone Age compared with the recent wealth of data, Chapman used to tell me how lucky I was to have a vast amount of data available.

It is suggested that the new International Polar Year organizers can learn, from the 34 volumes of Annals of IGY, how the IGY people planned a great international scientific enterprise in the future. Perhaps many of the organizers do not know that the Annals of IGY even exist, although I am not blaming any IPY organizer, because many of the organizers were not born, or were less than ten years old in 1957 and 1958.

Further, all IPY projects should have a well-organized plan as to how the great variety of data should be integrated and synthesized in understanding the earth as a system.

It is hoped that there will be a concerted effort to identify natural changes in the present warming trend.

Syun-Ichi Akasofu recently retired as director of the International Arctic Research Center.