Princess Elisabeth Polar Science Station
On September 6, 2007, Belgian-based International Polar Foundation unveiled octagonal spaceship-like Princess Elisabeth station, the world's first zero-emissions polar science station in Antarctica to research on climate change. Costing $16.3 million, the prefabricated station, which is part of International Polar Year, will be shipped to Antarctica from Belgium (to monitor the health of the polar regions, using icebreakers, satellites, stations and submarines). Belgian polar explorer Alain Hubert stated that "This base will be the first of its kind to produce zero emissions, making it a unique model of how energy should be used in the Antarctic," Johan Berte is the leader of the station design team and manager of the project (which will conduct research in climatology, glaciology and microbiology), and the project unified scientists from 63 nations in 228 studies.
This polar station was the main motif in one of the most recent commemorative coins issued by Belgium: the International Polar Foundation commemorative coin minted in 2007, with a face value of 10 euro. In the obverse of the coin, a view of the polar station with it three wind turbines can be seen.
Read more about this topic: International Polar Year
Famous quotes containing the words princess, polar, science and/or station:
“At the next town
the local princess was having a contest.
A common way for princesses to marry.
Fifty men had perished,
gargling the sea like soup.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“In time your relatives will come to accept the idea that a career is as important to you as your family. Of course, in time the polar ice cap will melt.”
—Barbara Dale (b. 1940)
“What happened at Hiroshima was not only that a scientific breakthrough ... had occurred and that a great part of the population of a city had been burned to death, but that the problem of the relation of the triumphs of modern science to the human purposes of man had been explicitly defined.”
—Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982)
“Say first, of God above, or Man below,
What can we reason, but from what we know?
Of Man what see we, but his station here,
From which to reason, or to which refer?
Thro’ worlds unnumber’d tho’ the God be known,
‘Tis ours to trace him only in our own.
”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)