POLENET or The Polar Earth Observing Network is a collaborative project in which international scientists and engineers are working together in the polar regions to understand how the earth’s surface responds to the changing size of polar ice sheets. The amount of water locked up in these ice sheets is so large that even minor melting can increase the rate of sea level rise around the world, affecting billions of people who live in coastal areas.

It has been endorsed as a core activity of the International Polar Year (IPY) 2007-2009.

The POLENET project is collecting GPS and seismic data from new stations we are installing at remote sites spanning much of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. Integrating GPS and seismic measurements will help us model how much ice was lost over the past 10,000 years since the last major ice age. Combining our ground-based data with information gathered by satellites will allow us to determine where, and at what rate, the ice sheets are changing in response to recent climate change.

The unprecedented scale of POLENET measurements will enable new studies of the inner earth, tectonic plates, climate and weather, and the solar wind, and will lead to unimagined discoveries about the critical polar regions of our planet.