Bauer's international outlook extended the reach of the national surveys, cruises and expeditions through a variety of collaborations, for which the Department furnished the instruments and instructed or supplied the observers. Many of these collaborations conveyed the names of famous explorers and were major efforts for their organizers. There were also a large number of small efforts that returned valuable if limited data. Some of the expeditions that for one reason or another attract one's attention will be briefly described here.

Captain Roald Amundsen was the best-known, certainly the most competent arctic explorer, and had located the north magnetic pole in 1904. In April 1918 he approached Bauer to discuss plans for the Maud expedition. The Maud was a three-masted wooden schooner designed to be frozen into ice. His object was to so position it as to drift in ice for 3 years across the Polar Sea. The Norwegian Harald Ulrik Sverdrup had been in charge of the Maud's scientific program since 1917 and was a research associate of the Department, which modified a dip-circle and magnetometer for the task and provided equipment for atmospheric electricity studies. The attempts in the summers of 1918, 1919 and 1920 did not succeed, although he sailed along the coast of northern Siberia from Varde, Norway to Nome, Alaska, occupying a number of land stations where data were acquired to the extent allowed by sledge trips. The 1918–19 venture cost the lives of two men, lost on a sledge trip for communication.