Preface

*Antarctica* is the key to understanding the past and present status of Earth's systems, as well as predicting future facts about our planet as viewed from the polar region. Antarctica, composed of an ice-covered continent at its center and surrounded by the Southern Ocean, has been investigated during the last half century by researchers from a variety of scientific branches, including bioscience, the physical sciences, geoscience, oceanography, and environmental studies, together with the technological domain. This book covers recent developments in the scientific research in and around Antarctica, with a view to monitor current variations in the extreme environment, effects from the remarkable changes in temperature and sea-ice extent, the mass loss of ice sheets and glaciers, and variations in marine and terrestrial ecosystems, including human activities.

> **Masaki Kanao** National Institute of Polar Research, Tokyo, Japan

> > **Genti Toyokuni** Department of Geophysics, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan

**Masa-yuki Yamamoto** Kochi University of Technology, Kami-shi, Kochi, Japan

**1**

**Chapter 1**

*Masaki Kanao*

**1. Introduction**

**Figure 1**.

**2. Scope of the book**

Introductory Chapter: Antarctica -

"Antarctica" is a keystone to understand the past and present status on the Earth system, as well as to predict future figures of our planet as viewed from the polar region. The Antarctic region, composed by ice-covered continent in its center and surrounding the Southern Ocean, has been gradually investigated by a human being during the last half-century by all kinds of scientific branches: bioscience, physical sciences, geosciences, oceanography, environmental studies, and together with their technological innovative developments. Antarctica occupies a pivotal location to have an understanding of the evolution of the past supercontinents such as Rodinia and Gondwana as well as the present day plate movement among global tectonics. Major location names in the Antarctic region are illustrated in

This book covers the topics on recent development of all kinds of scientific researches in and around the Antarctic region, with a viewpoint to monitor the current variations in the extreme environment, affected by remarkable changes in temperature and sea-ice extent, mass loss of ice-sheet and glaciers, variations in marine and terrestrial ecosystem including human activities. Multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary approaches are beneficial in bi-polar researches, being focused on the interrelated perspectives which will be needed to understand and quantify their

Scientific challenges in the Antarctic include a signature on the presence of the ice sheets, ice shelves, glaciers, and sea-ice in and around the continent. In this concern, particularly the cryosphere system is likely to be influenced by temporalspatial variations in the surface environment in the Antarctic, and continuous researches of their variability provide direct evidence of climate change. For

instance, cryosphere originated seismic signals have been significantly reported and can be classified into several kinds of generating sources: dynamics of ice sheets, ice-caps, sea-ice, oceanic tidal cracks, icebergs and calving fronts of the ice caps,

Since the most exciting initiative in the Arctic region was the International Polar Year (IPY) in 2007–2008, which had been conducted at the 50th anniversary of the International Geophysical Year (IGY 1957–1958). The IPY was a big international program composed of multi-disciplinary science branches: upper atmosphere, meteorology, glaciology, geosciences, oceanography, and biosciences conducted by a significant number of polar scientists involved [5]. The initiative significantly

connections with the prediction of future climate system change.

and basal sliding of ice streams and glaciers [1–4].

A Key to Global Change
