As a result of field opportunities, BASICS-IPY has been mainly focused in the Antarctic on spring-summer pack ice studies.
However, one of the targets of the International Polar Year was to extend polar research to less known areas and under-sampled time
windows on the longer term. 'YROSIAE' will therefore aim at a year-round study of landfast sea ice in Scott Base,Antarctica. In the
line of the previous investigations, the work will focus on the study of landfast sea ice physics and biogeochemistry in order to
better understand and budget exchanges of energy and matter across the atmosphere-sea ice-ocean interfaces during ice growth and
decay, and to quantify their potential impact on fluxes of climate gases (CO2, DMS, CH4, N2O) to the atmosphere and carbon export to
the deep ocean. For the reasons developed above, the project will also specifically investigate the biogeochemical cycle of iron
and other potentially important more specific/trace elements.