Celebrate INSTAAR’s 75th Anniversary!

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) at the University of Colorado Boulder! INSTAAR is CU Boulder’s oldest research institute, focusing on interdisciplinary exploration of environmental issues in polar and high mountain climate zones.

A meteorology station gathers weather information on Taylor Glacier in Antarctica. Photo from INSTAAR.

The Institute of Alpine and Arctic Ecology, which later became INSTAAR, was established in 1951 due to efforts of a biology professor named John Marr. Marr was teaching a class focusing on winter research at CU’s mountain field station, Science Lodge, when he and his students got caught in a blizzard. They agreed that it would be useful to study the relationship of alpine climates to plants and wildlife in order to understand the full alpine ecosystem in the mountains west of Boulder. The U.S. Army was also interested in learning more about winter climates, so Marr proposed that the Army Quartermaster Corps contract with CU Boulder to help fund the research project. With funding secured, the institute was born and soon Marr and his team established sixteen research stations with instruments to gather data about the climate of Front Range ecosystems. An in-depth history of INSTAAR can be found in a booklet the institute published in celebration of its 50th anniversary.

In the time since its establishment, INSTAAR has expanded its mission, its funding sources, and its international reach, with research field sites on all seven continents. INSTAAR researchers include geologists, ecologists, environmental scientists, atmospheric and oceanic scientists, engineers, and more, who all work together to conduct interdisciplinary research on the past, present, and future of the Earth’s climate. Along with their research mission, INSTAAR manages the Spruce Gulch Wildlife and Research Reserve just outside Boulder. The Reserve can be visited by scientists, students, K-12 schools, and nonprofit groups seeking to learn about the ecology and hydrology of the foothills watershed.

The Colorado State Publications Library holds over 100 INSTAAR reports in our collection. Many of these reports are part of INSTAAR’s Occasional Papers series, which ran from 1971-2013. These papers tend to be longer and more data-intensive than typical journal articles but are just as scientifically rigorous, going through a peer review and editing process by the staff of Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research. A few interesting papers are highlighted below:

Explore the Earth’s climate through all the INSTAAR reports available in our digital collection.