1800s, yeah.

There was a sort of off-again, on-again interest there.

among meteorologists on land and also among ships captains at sea to do a better job of forecasting the weather and making sure that different forecasts sort of jibed with each other so that people could sort of have an understanding of what was going on, not just to the horizon, but even beyond the horizon.

And this turned into what was called the first, well, Maybe they didn't call it the first, they wouldn't have known, but it was a polar year in which Antarctica and the Arctic were sort of the focus of scientific study for a year.

And then I think 25 years later came the second polar year.

Huge, huge difference because in the second polar year, which was in the 1930s, we had so much more capability to observe and measure what was going on in the earth and what was going on in the sky, that the second polar year was like a whole different animal than the first one.

A whole new range of knowledge, a whole new range of understanding.

Mark is the author of the 2025 book, The Year Science Changed Everything, 1957's International Geophysical Year and the Future of Our Planet.