Creating a European network for the joint use of polar research infrastructures is the aim of POLARIN, Polar Research Infrastructure Network, a project coordinated by the Alfred Wegener Institute and involving numerous international partners, including the National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics (OGS), the Institute of Polar Sciences of the National Research Council (CNR-ISP), ETT s.p.a and INKODE Soc. Coop..The project involves 50 partners from 21 countries also outside of the European Union, including Canada, United States of America, United Kingdom, Ukraine and Chile.
POLARIN intends to give researchers the opportunity to directly or remotely access 64 European polar research infrastructures, such as research stations in the Arctic and Antarctic, research vessels and icebreakers operating at both poles, observatories both on land and at sea, ice core and sediment data infrastructures and archives, in order to request samples, data and other resources from each structure without any need for the requester to be on site.
The European Union will provide approximately €14.6 million in funding over the next 5 years to support the challenging scientific research activities in both polar regions.
The infrastructures provided by Italy for the project include the “Mario Zucchelli” station, the French-Italian “Concordia” station, the icebreaking vessel “Laura Bassi”, the Italian National Antarctic Data Center (NADC), and the Italian Arctic Data Centre (IADC).
“In addition to providing its icebreaking vessel “Laura Bassi”, the OGS will be involved in user training activities to ensure an effective and safe use of infrastructures as well as to guarantee optimal data management in terms of findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability, according to the FAIR principles,” said Michele Rebesco, scientific coordinator for OGS within POLARIN. “Moreover, OGS will carry out the scientific evaluation and classification of the proposals submitted to the calls for use of POLARIN infrastructures”.
