Editing International Polar Year (section)

==The First International Polar Year (1882–1883)==
[[File:MECHELIN(1894) p252 Polar Station in Sodankylä.jpg|thumb|Polar Station in [[Sodankylä]]  (1894)]]
The First International Polar Year was proposed by an [[Austro-Hungarian]] naval officer, [[Karl Weyprecht]], in 1875 and organized by [[Georg Neumayer]], director of the German Maritime Observatory. Rather than settling for traditional individual and national efforts, they pushed for a coordinated scientific approach to researching [[Arctic]] phenomena. Observers made coordinated geophysical measurements at multiple locations in the Arctic during the same year enabling multiple views of the same phenomena, allowing broader interpretation of the available data and validation of the results obtained.

It took seven years to organize the first IPY which had eleven participating nations: the [[Austro-Hungarian Empire]], Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Sweden, United Kingdom, and United States.

The aforementioned countries operated 12 stations in the [[Arctic]] and two in the sub-[[Antarctic]]. Six additional meteorological stations were organized by Neumayer at Moravian mission stations on the east coast of Labrador. Observations focused on meteorology, geomagnetism, auroral phenomena, ocean currents, tides, structure, and the motion of ice and atmospheric electricity. More than 40 meteorological observatories around the world expanded the IPY programs of observations for this period. Data and images from the first IPY have recently been made available to browse and download on the internet.<ref name="auto1">{{Cite web |url=http://www.nisc.com/ipy |title=International Polar Year Publications Database |access-date=2016-11-29 |archive-date=2016-11-10 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20161110081009/http://www.nisc.com/ipy/ |url-status=dead }}</ref><ref>[http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/arctic-zone/ipy-1/ The First International Polar Year]</ref> These records of the first IPY offer a rare glimpse of the circumpolar Arctic environment as it existed in the past and hold the potential to improve our understanding of historical climate variability and environmental change in the Arctic.