The International Geophysical Year

T

he International Geophysical Year (IGY) was an epical scientific event. Through­out the community of geophysical researchers, it provided an infusion of funds and an integrating mechanism for hundreds of individual efforts that were made pos­sible by the rapidly evolving technologies of the time. The various coordination and sharing arrangements that were established for the IGY facilitated the interchange of data and information at a level far beyond that which would have occurred otherwise, and many of those arrangements have continued to the present day.

IGY inception and early planning

This IGY was not the first comparable international effort, although the scale of the new endeavor went far beyond that of previous ones. By the late nineteenth century, there had been a growing realization that the need for observations was global in nature, far beyond territorial boundaries, the intellectual resources of individuals, and even entire countries. This realization, coupled with the newly evolving technologies, was pushing the frontiers of human exploration over more and more of the Earth’s surface.

As a part of that expanding vision, two large-scale international efforts were mounted to apply the combined resources of the world’s leading scientists to exam­ine broad geophysical questions. The First International Polar Year, in 1882-1883, involved a collaboration of scientists to examine the geophysics of the Polar Regions, with concentration on the Arctic. That program included the establishment of a number of meteorological, magnetic, and auroral stations and their operation for about a year.

The Second International Polar Year was conducted during 1932-1933, the golden jubilee of the first. It repeated the earlier endeavor but extended its scope by adding ionospheric observations and by including a substantial component in the Antarctic.

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Подпись:Those two collaborations provided some of the inspiration, and served as a model, for the International Geophysical Year—1957-1958. That third endeavor, marking the silver jubilee of the Second Polar Year, took place during the period 1 July 1957 through 31 December 1958.

Much has been published over the years to document the planning and achievements of the IGY.1,2’3’4’5’6 Thus, only a brief summary is provided here.

An informal and largely spontaneous dinner party at the Van Allen home in 1950 served as the springboard for the IGY. Van Allen and his family were living at that time in a rented house at 1105 Meurilee Lane, Silver Spring, Maryland, located just off Dennis Avenue near its intersection with Sligo Creek Parkway. This was just a 10 minute drive from Van Allen’s laboratory in downtown Silver Spring.

In addition to hosts James and Abigail (Abbie) Van Allen, that dinner party included Lloyd V. Berkner, Sydney Chapman, J. Wally Joyce, S. Fred Singer, Merle A. Tuve, and E. Harry Vestine. The story of that momentous dinner is best told in Van Allen’s own words:

Vestine [Harry Vestine, who had originally urged Van Allen to make the electrojet search] was delighted with our equatorial electrojet results, as was [Sydney] Chapman who was visiting the United States in early April 1950. On April 5, they visited APL in order to learn about the results at first hand. Chapman expressed an interest in getting together with us and with Lloyd Berkner and Wally Joyce for further discussions. I immediately called my wife to confirm a previously tentative plan that she would have the group for dinner at our home. During the day, she cleaned the house, prepared a splendid dinner, and managed to feed our two young daughters and tuck them into bed as the guests arrived.

The occasion turned out to be one of the most felicitous and inspiring that I have ever experienced. Berkner was one of the leading experts on ionospheric physics and telecommu­nications at that time, had been a member of the scientific staff of the first Byrd Antarctic Expedition in 1928-1930, and had extensive experience in international cooperation in sci­ence while a member of the U. S. State Department. Joyce was a distinguished geomagnetician who had published the well-known Manual of Geophysical Prospecting with the Magnetome­ter in 1937 and was, as I recall, on the staff of the National Research Council at this time.

The dinner conversation ranged widely over geophysics and especially geomagnetism and ionospheric physics. Following dinner, as we were all sipping brandy in the living room, Berkner turned to Chapman and said, “Sydney, don’t you think that it is about time for another international polar year?” Chapman immediately embraced the suggestion, remarking that he had been thinking along the same lines himself. The conversation was then directed to the scope of the enterprise and to practical considerations of how to contact leading individuals in a wide range of international organizations in order to enlist their support. The year 1957-1958, the 25th anniversary of the second polar year and one of anticipated maximum solar activity, was selected. By the close of the evening Chapman, Berkner, and Joyce had agreed on the strategy for proceeding.7

Van Allen’s wife Abbie had a slightly different recollection of the event. In a conversation with Tom Krimigis in July 2007 she related, “… she was talking with Chapman first thing after the dinner and he was waxing eloquently about the Inter­national Polar Year of 1932-33. She suggested, “isn’t it about time to have another one?” to which he responded, “Well, maybe we should.”8

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Planning for this third international endeavor progressed steadily. In May 1950, some 20 scientists, including Chapman (who had by that time left Oxford University for the University of Alaska), further discussed the suggestion at a meeting at the Naval Ordnance Test Station (now Naval Air Weapons Station) near Inyokern, China Lake, California. Further discussions and conceptual planning occurred soon after that at a Conference on the Physics of the Ionosphere, hosted by the Ionospheric Laboratory of Pennsylvania State University.

A formal proposal based on those discussions was conveyed by Berkner and Chapman in July 1950 to the Joint Commission on the Ionosphere, an organization of the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU). During the rest of 1950,

1951, and much of 1952, the proposal wended its way through the various ICSU member organizations. In the process, the World Meteorological Organization was added to the list of supporting institutions. The program’s scope was expanded to include synoptic observations of geophysical phenomena over the whole surface of the Earth. At the Amsterdam meeting of the ICSU General Assembly in October

1952, its name was changed to the International Geophysical Year—1957-1958. It soon came to be referred to simply as the IGY.

Sydney Chapman best summarized the scope of the IGY, as finally conceived, in his general foreword to the first volume of the Annals of the IGY:

The main aim is to learn more about the fluid envelope of our planet—the atmosphere and oceans—over all the Earth and at all heights and depths. The atmosphere, especially at its upper levels, is much affected by disturbances on the Sun; hence, this also will be observed more closely and continuously than hitherto. Weather, the ionosphere, the Earth’s magnetism, the polar lights, cosmic rays, glaciers all over the world, the size, and form of the Earth, natural and man-made radioactivity in the air and the seas, earthquake waves in remote places, will be among the subjects studied. These researches demand widespread simultaneous observation.9

The Joint Commission on the Ionosphere recommended that a committee be es­tablished as a focus for the detailed planning. That committee was formally consti­tuted, also at the October 1952 ICSU meeting, as the Comite Speciale de l’Annee Geophysique Internationale (referred to universally as the CSAGI). The CSAGI cen­tral direction was entrusted to a bureau consisting of Sydney Chapman (President), Lloyd Berkner (Vice President), Marcel Nicolet (Secretary-General), Vladimir V Beloussov (Member), and Jean Coulomb (Member).

Four major meetings of the CSAGI, including representation from all participating nations, were held during the period 1953 through 1956 to coordinate overall planning by the many suborganizations and among the national programs. Those pivotal meet­ings tookplace at Brussels on 30 June-3 July 1953, Rome on 30 September-4 October 1954, Brussels on 8-14 September 1955, and Barcelona on 10-15 September 1956.10

During that early planning period, a series of Antarctic, Arctic, Regional, and Discipline Conferences were also held to serve as forums for integrating various

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Подпись:components of the program. The Antarctic and Arctic conferences concentrated on the overall programs for those two regions, whereas the Regional conferences addressed the Western Hemisphere, Eastern Europe, Eurasia, Africa (south of the Sahara), and the Western Pacific.

The CSAGI established 14 Discipline Groups to plan many of the details.11

Responding to the invitation from the first CSAGI conference in July 1953 to countries of the world to join in the endeavor, the U. S. National Academy of Sciences, acting through its National Research Council, quickly established a U. S. National Committee for the IGY, with Joseph Kaplan as its chairman and Hugh Odishaw as its executive director. That committee served as the focal point throughout the duration of the program for all U. S. IGY planning and operational efforts.

Many other countries responded quickly to the invitation and set up their own mechanisms for coordinating their internal contributions. A key player, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), was slow in reporting its commitment to the IGY, but by the spring of 1955, it had also done so.