The United States program for the International Geophysical Year is part of a world-wide scientific undertaking by more than 50 nations in an internationally planned and coordinated effort to study geophysics on a truly global scale during the period of high solar activity, 1957-1958.

The second general assembly of the CSAGI, the international committee for the IGY, in Rome in the fall of 1954, developed criteria for the selection and planning of observational programs in the individual geophysical disciplines. Each participating nation followed these criteria in planning its own program. The major emphasis is given to problems requiring concurrent synoptic global observations involving coordinated efforts by many nations. Also of great importance are the activities undertaken in remote regions of the earth, such as the Antarctic, the Arctic, and the vast oceanic areas.

In the United States, the National Academy of Sciences, as the adhering body of the U. S. scientists to the International Council of Scientific Unions, established the United States National Committee for the International Geophysical Year. This committee, with its technical panels and regional committees, is responsible for the planning, direction, and execution of the U. S. program. The membership of the technical panels and committees is made up of scientists drawn from private, governmental, educational, and research institutions from all over the country. Department of Defense research and logistics efforts are being utilized in certain areas to supplement and expand the IGY activities.

Closely following the criteria established by the CSAGI, the USNC-Technical Panels developed programs in Meteorology, Geomagnetism, Aurora and Airglow, Ionosphere, Solar Activity, Cosmic Rays, Longitude and Latitude, Glaciology, Oceanography, Rocketry, Seismology, and Gravity, and, as announced by the President of the United States on July 29, 1955, scientific studies using earth-circling satellites. Activities in these programs range geographically from the Arctic to the Antarctic, throughout all of the continental United States, its territories and possessions, and parts of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, penetrating deep into the earth, oceans, and ice, and high into the atmosphere.

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The planning of this vast program is now nearing completion: the execution of the program and the analysis of the ensuing data will involve scientists from institutions throughout the country. The IGY will afford unprecedented opportunities for participation and achievement by scientists and their institutions and should constitute the greatest peace-time stimulus yet to geophysics.

As comprehensive and far-flung as the U. S. program is, it is only part of the international effort. It may well be that the "large view," so typical in astronomy and global geophysics, attendant on the mutual and fruitful cooperation of most of the world in the IGY, will eventually give the IGY a value far transcending the gathering of data and the observation of physical processes.

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