Media Invited to NASA Co-Sponsored ’Polar-Palooza’ Tour

WASHINGTON - “Polar-Palooza: Stories from a Changing Planet,” an education initiative supported by NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF), comes to the National Geographic Society in Washington on March 13 as part of a national tour of science centers and museums.

Polar-Palooza is a multimedia presentation featuring original high-definition video clips, polar artifacts, soundscapes and photographs - along with engaging stories from some of the country’s leading polar experts - designed to explain to a general audience the effects on the polar regions of global climate changes.

The news media are invited to attend the March 13 event, which begins at 7:30 p.m. EDT, at the National Geographic building, 1600 M Street, NW. Polar scientists participating in this event will be available for interviews at the National Geographic building between noon and 2 p.m. on March 13. Reporters also can observe a Polar-Palooza student workshop that morning.

The Polar-Palooza event, a presentation of the “National Geographic Live!” lecture series, features Waleed Abdalati of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.; Richard Alley, a geoscientist at Pennsylvania State University; Jackie Richter-Menge, a sea ice researcher with the Army Corps of Engineers Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory; Richard Glenn, a geologist, whaler and vice president of the Alaskan Native-owned Lands at the Arctic Slope Regional Corp.; Michael Castellini of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks; and Andy Revkin, environmental reporter with the New York Times.

NASA and NSF are funding Polar-Palooza as part of their contribution to the International Polar Year (IPY) 2007-2008, a global scientific campaign involving scientists from more than 60 nations. For more information about IPY activities on the Web, visit:

http://www.ipy.gov