At the time, many commentators saw the International Geophysical Year 1957-58 (IGY) as an exception to Cold War hostilities. It was believed that the IGY proved that science transcended geopolitical borders and that cooperation between East and West indeed was possible. Hugh Odishaw, the man chiefly responsible for organizing the vast American effort, described the IGY as “the single most significant peaceful activity of mankind since the Renaissance and the Copernican Revolution” (cited from Sullivan 1962, p. 4).
While IGY was an important milestone, and contributed greatly to each of the component fields of geophysics, the IGY was also intimately connected with the national security aims of the leading nations involved in the effort. Geophysics, secrecy, datacollection, intelligence-gathering, and research agendas were closely interlinked because of the strategic place that the earth sciences occupied in Cold War security policies (Doel 2003; Dennis 2006; Elzinga 1992; Korsmo 2007; Needell, 2000).
The IGY organizers realized the importance of selling science and international collaboration to the general public. The US National Academy of Sciences, which played a major role in preparing for the IGY, began a public relations effort by the mid-1950’s that included the production of classroom material and a films series, called Planet Earth, designed for the general public. One of the explicit goals of this campaign was to attract more students into the sciences. The campaign, however, was also used to manage the tensions between, on the one hand, the public nature of IGY as pure science and international collaboration and, on the other, the need for military confidentiality and secrecy (Korsmo 2004).
The IGY included many missions and ventures in the Arctic regions. The present subproject intends to explore the geophysical undertakings in Greenland to see, if they are different from IGY projects in other locations, and to which extent they were run as Danish-American or Danish-European collaborations. Also, this subproject will explore the attention given to public communication of geophysical research in connection with IGY, and with a particular emphasis on Greenland. The subproject will be a collaborative effort of all the researchers involved in the Exploring Greenland project.
