The International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) is a non-governmental organization, founded in 1931, to bring together natural scientists in international scientific endeavor. It comprises multi-disciplinary national scientific members (scientific research councils or science academies) and international, single-discipline scientific unions to provide a wide spectrum of scientific expertise enabling members to address major international, interdisciplinary issues which none could handle alone.

In 1952, the ICSU proposed a comprehensive series of global geophysical activities to span the period July 1957 to December 1958. The International Geophysical Year (IGY), as it was called, was modeled on the International Polar Years of 1882–83 and 1932–33, and was intended to allow scientists from around the world to take part in a series of coordinated observations of various phenomena in Geophysics. A special committee, CSAGI (Comité Spécial de l'Année Géophysique Internationale), was...