PLC Bremerhaven Weds. June 16, 2010

I've left our colleagues over on the patio at Lloyd's next to the hotel, enjoying the wonderful evening sunshine. This is the same patio where they have the giant screen and are showing the World Cup Games regularly. Germany plays again Friday, and judging by the parties last Monday when they won the preliminary game, Friday will be a wild night.

Today was our Polar History day.
Our day began with Session 4: Polar Research in Historical Context, ably moderated by Elaine Maloney. Our first presentation was by Reinhard Krause of the Alfred Wegener Insitute (our host organization)on the history of the IPY idea. Using many photographs and illustrations of early documents, Dr. Krause first described the polar research landscape as it was in the years that led up to the first IPY and introduced us to the most important personalities. I hope that the slides for this presentation will be on the web-site. It was so rich with illustrations, that anyone viewing it, even without the text, will get a lot out of it.

Our second speaker was Hans Oerter, also from AWI. Dr. Oerter talked about the legacy of Alfred Wegener’s work and the research programs that have been built upon it. Much of the work has been done on the Greenland glaciers. Dr. Oerter pointed out to us that while Greenland is 81% glaciated, the unglaciated area of Greenland is larger than Germany. The other striking fact that we learned is that while the ice is very thick in the central part of Greenland, much of that area receives so little precipitation that it is actually classified as a desert.

Session 5, Polar History – Examples and Methods followed with Sharon Tahirkheli moderating.
Tatiana Fridman, one of our two new members from the Kola Science Centre in Apatity Russia, gave us a history of the Khibinskaya Mountain Station, where the First Polar Conference was held April 9-12, 1932. She also described for us her work on the Special Edition of “Important Milestones in the Development of Science in the Kola North”, an important work which was republished in 2009. It is really good to have our Russian colleagues here and to be able to learn about their information environments, both through formal presentations and informal conversations.

I think I saw Hilary Shibata last at the Rome conference. Hillary has a unique perspective having worked at the Scott Polar Research Institute for many years, and having also spent many years living in Japan. So she is perfectly positioned to bring us the story of Lt. Shirase and the Japanese Antarctic Expedition 1910 – 1912. This Expedit Reseach Instituteion has not received much attention in the popular English language press as have other Antarctic Expeditions of the same era. Our Japanese colleague, Yoriko Hayakawa (and it's wonderful to have a Japanese polar colleague here) tells me that Japanese school children are more likely to study later expeditions, as well.

Laura Kissel, of the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University, rounded out our morning with an interesting presentation on a program for building curriculum packages with high school teachers as a way of increasing use of the Byrd collection. By combining carefully constructed step-by-step lesson plans with carefully-selected primary materials from the Byrd collection, Laura and her team created a learning environment that would give many high school students their first with polar studies.

This ended our formal sessions for Wednesday. We headed over to the German Emigration Center for a group photograph and then lunch. After lunch, we were each given a card with an emigrant’s name and dates on the jacket. The Emigration Centre is designed to tell the story of the millions of people who left Europe through the port of Bremerhaven. At four points, we used our cards to activate an audio file which told us part of our emigrant’s story. My lady had been a Jewish doctor, who, with her husband was stripped of the right to practice and in 1939, was able to get to England, and eventually to New York. (My European colleagues may wish to skip the following babble).The most striking thing to me about this experience is that the story is that of emigration. Those of us who are non-indigenous people from the Americas and Australia know the same stories as immigration stories. We are the product of the people who made that trip and survived. These stories parallel our family histories, but we know them not as “they left”, but as “we arrived”.

From the historical to the modern, we next hopped on a bus for a tour of the harbor. This is a huge container port and cruise ship dock. As one of our colleagues commented, it does look like something out of Star Wars with its multitude of cranes, bridges and mobile container movers that look sort of like four-legged spiders with containers slung under their bellies. Of course they don’t walk, the legs are fixed and on wheels, so they drive around in a bee-hive of activity, collecting containers, driving over the spots or stacks where the containers are to be placed and then precisely lowering the containers so that they stack up like building blocks.

Kudos and thanks to Marcel, who has done a great job of giving us different ways of getting to know and understand Bemerhaven, the work of the Alfred Wegener Institute and the perspectives on things polar from this part of Europe.

Cheers from Bremerhaven. Sandy Campbell