The Arctic Rediscovery Project: crowd-sourcing new science from intractable data

The Arctic is changing fast. Nearly every year now there are new records set – ever lower sea ice cover, warm air and ocean temperatures, familiar ecosystems altered. But with our perspective constrained by limited data, can we fully appreciate the scale and context of these changes? The mission of the Arctic Rediscovery Project is to find more and better information about the Arctic environment of days gone by and re-purpose it for modern research needs. Old information tends to be intractable: for example, in hard-to-decipher handwriting in a ship's logbook or other one-of-a-kind manuscript that is difficult to access. As these data are converted and made universally available we can gain new perspective on long-term variations in sea ice and other environmental features of the Arctic. And unexpected uses continue to emerge, from developing long-term records of space weather, to uncovering the hidden chronology of volcanic eruptions in the Aleutian Islands.

See http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/arctic/rediscover/. Acknowledgments: Support for the Arctic Rediscovery Project is provided by North Pacific Research Board (NPRB). Many partners and collaborators have made indispensable contributions to the project.