Ice Stories: Dispatches from Polar Scientists describes the working lives of penguin biologists, glaciologists, cosmologists, geologists, and marine scientists working in Antarctica and the Arctic. It is a new feature on the website of Exploratorium , the San Francisco science museum that is a member of NSDL’s SMILE pathway for informal education. Exploratorium gave cameras to eight scientists from five different projects in Antarctica during the Austral summer this year (from December to March). The scientists are documenting their adventures in real time, in photos, videos, and blogs. The site also features regular webcasts where polar scientists take questions from a live audience. The project is part of the celebration of the International Polar Year (2007-08), and it will add correspondents from Barrow, Alaska in June 2008.

In one series of webcasts, Stanford geologist Christina Riesselman explains her work on ANDRILL (ANtarctic geological DRILLing), a collaboration of more than 200 scientists, students, and educators from Germany, Italy, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. The project’s goal is to recover stratigraphic records from the Antarctic sea floor; the drill cores allow Riesselman and other scientists to go back in time to recover a history of paleoenvironmental changes that will improve our understanding of the speed, size, and frequency of glacial and interglacial changes in the Antarctica region. These climactic timelines will improve future scenarios of global warming by giving clues to the potential timing, frequency, and sites of future changes.

Ice Stories blog posts, photos, and videos will be available in a few days, but you can take a look at the webcasts now.