The Arctic Ocean is the home of three major groups of mammals that depend on the sea for survival and show varying degrees of adaptation for maritime life. Most fully adapted are the whales (Cetacea), which never leave the water, and the seals and walruses (Pinnipedia) that feed entirely at sea but emerge onto land or ice for pupping and basking. Less exclusively marine are two species of the order Carnivora—Polar Bears (Ursus maritimus), that seldom live far from the sea because they feed almost entirely upon seals, and Arctic Foxes (Alopex lagopus), some of which move out onto the sea ice during the winter, mainly to scavenge on the remains of seals killed by Polar Bears.

The cause of the phenomenally high winds recorded by Sir Douglas Mawson's party at Cape Denison during the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, 1911–14 (Mawson, 1939), and by the French expedition to Port Martin in 1950–51 (Boujon, 1954) has never been satisfactorily explained. As indicated in the Table, the annual mean wind recorded at those stations, 71·1 and 64·6 km per h respectively, is about 70 per cent greater than recorded elsewhere around the coast at stations fully exposed to katabatic flow, notably Mirny and Mawson. Admittedly, the total number of coastal stations is small, considering the length of the Antarctic coastline, and one cannot exclude the possibility that similar very strong winds prevail in other places. Nevertheless, the figures for Cape Denison and Port Martin are notable, if not unique, and the question arises why this should occur on the coast of Terre Adélie.

Heterotrophic and hydrocarbon-degrading microbial populations in soils from different depths in a permafrost soil profile at a hydrocarbon-contaminated site at Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard, were examined and compared to the populations present at a pristine site. The objective was to investigate whether the populations were enhanced after 12 years of exposure to hydrocarbons. Based on air and soil temperature data, it is concluded that the microorganisms living in these environments are cold-adapted. Proliferation of the populations by a factor of 100–1000 was measured in the layers where mineral oil was present in high concentrations. This indicates that the populations responded to the additional carbon source by degradation and growth on hydrocarbons or hydrocarbon metabolites. A high number of intrinsic heterotrophic and hydrocarbon-degrading bacteria is a prerequisite for in situ bioremediation of contaminated sites. Although the hydrocarbon-degrading activities of the populations are not known, the results show that the population sizes probably do not represent the limiting factor in a bioremedial action at this contaminated Arctic permafrost site.

This article examines the impacts of burgeoning globalisation on small fishery-based villages in Iceland. With economic restructuring, new technologies in production, and changing labour migration, the inhabitants are not uniformly able to take advantage of current changes, and some have lost while others have gained. The paper examines the effects on people's lives and experiences and how they cope with these changes locally. The discussion is based on ethnographic field research in the 1990s. It takes a particular look at aspects of local identities that are related to gender and nationality. Since gender and ethnic differences are embedded in social institutions, they are integral parts of individuals' strategies to make better lives for themselves. Gender and nationality are constructed in the process of societal transformations. The primary goal of this paper is to shed light on gender in relation to current transformation. However, nationality is a new marker of difference within the localities — with the growing number of immigrants — that is important to consider. Combining attention to gender and ethnic constructions gives a broad picture of life in fishery villages in the Arctic and the various strategies applied by the inhabitants.

During the last decades, scholarly studies on Arctic identities have been on the increase, but less is known about how academic viewpoints diverge from aboriginal perspectives. The aim of this article is to compare both points of view, by looking at the way some academic specialists define Arctic identities, in contrast — or convergence — with how one Arctic people, the Inuit, perceive who they are. Twelve scholars conducting social research in the north and recognised for their competence were interviewed on their definition of identity and their assessment of the current situation of Arctic aboriginal populations. Their responses show that they view identity as a relational and constructed process, a process that continues without much disruption despite rapid social and cultural change. As modern Inuit are concerned, ethnography and personal testimonies tend to show that they perceive identity as an open-ended and individual — as opposed to collective — relationship rather than as a way of classifying people. Inuit perceptions agree on some points — the relational aspects for instance — but diverge on others — for example, the primarily individual nature of identity — from those of the interviewed scholars, and they should be taken into account in any assessment of the current human situation in the Arctic.

Since the end of the Cold War, cooperative and region-building endeavours involving Arctic governments and peoples have flourished. These efforts have been rooted in a desire to pursue northern sustainable development and in assertions about the shared experiences and values of Arctic states and peoples. In this paper, a case study is presented concerning a Canadian development project designed to promote Canadian sustainable economic development models to indigenous and non-indigenous leaders and bureaucrats in the Russian north. In their efforts to move knowledge across northern borders, the Canadian project team relied clearly upon two central discourses of the Arctic region-building process: a common Arctic space and the shared pursuit of sustainable development. Drawing upon over thirty qualitative interviews and a year of participant observation at project events, the aim of this article is to map the currency and reach of these Arctic regional discourses at a more ‘local’ level amongst the Russian and Canadian Arctic residents involved in the project. The continuing debate during this development project over what Arctic regionalism and sustainable development mean in practice calls into question a key assertion of contemporary region-building rhetoric, the assumption or hopeful injunction that not only is a regional landscape or environment shared but that values and experiences are, or will come to be, shared as well.

Legacy waste is a significant problem in Antarctica. This is particularly the case where waste generated on stations prior to the 1980s was incinerated, placed in landfill sites or disposed of at sea. Although several Australian Antarctic Division (AAD) reports from the 1980s recognise that there are contaminated sites at the abandoned Wilkes Station, there has been no systematic attempt to classify the waste or define the spatial scale of the problem, making development of strategic and systematic clean-up or preservation programmes difficult. This article reports on a project to classify the waste remaining on Clark Peninsula using categories listed in Annex III, Article 2 of the Madrid Protocol (1991). 536 sites with one or more waste items have been identified in nine categories that are based on the degree of waste hazard, recyclability, heritage value and waste management potential. Fuel drums, petroleum hydrocarbons waste and contaminated sediment occur at 38% of the sites. This waste includes around 1020 partially full fuel drums. Heritage items that illustrate expedition life at Wilkes occur at about 10% of the sites. Solid, non-combustible waste, including scrap metal, copper wire and pipe, and steel mechanical parts, occurs at 25% of the sites. Potentially hazardous or harmful waste including electrical batteries, plastics including fuel bladders, food remains, treated timber and containers containing persistent compounds occur at 28% of sites. Although hazardous substances, such as caustic soda, explosives and asbestos, occur at only 9% of the sites, these items represent significant contamination and heath issues for the sites and for visiting explorers. Any future clean-up operations will require more than just the physical removal of waste. Preservation, removal and treatment of various types of waste from Wilkes will be required as part of a multi-year, multi-strategy approach.

During the last decade, aboriginal peoples in Russia have sought to improve their legal rights, including their rights to their homelands and the resources of these lands. The Russian government initially responded to an aboriginal lobby by including discrete articles addressing aboriginal rights in a number of its laws, including those on forests, sub-surface resources, and protected areas. More comprehensive laws, specifically addressing aboriginal rights to land, were finally adopted at the turn of the twenty-first century, in 1999, 2000, and 2001. This article summarizes the rights of aboriginal peoples regarding land ownership/tenure, access to natural resources (renewable and sub-surface), and protection of ancestral lands, in the light of the new federal legislation. It also notes how the federal laws' provisions concur with international requirements for aboriginal land rights.

The Arctic is commonly perceived as a pristine wilderness, yet more than four centuries of human industry have not left Svalbard untouched. This paper explores the historical dimension of human-induced ecosystem change using human presence as a proxy. Its aims are fourfold: to reconstruct and quantify historical human presence, to ascertain if human presence is a suitable indicator of long-term anthropogenic pressure, to deduce trends in anthropogenic pressure on five selected species of game animal, and to postulate trends in their subpopulation sizes. Published sources give rise to 57 datasets dealing with the annual voyages to Svalbard as well as the participants in them. All known archaeological sites are visualised in a distribution map. Despite the large amount of data, the quantification of historical human presence remains biased and partial. Only with the aid of a timeline of known milestones is it possible to make hypotheses about changes in anthropogenic pressure and animal subpopulations over time. The exercise is nonetheless a necessary and instructive one: it confirms that the erroneous view of Svalbard as a pristine ecosystem hinders timely historical-ecological research. Future work must aim at the systematic quantification of past human impact in a holistic approach to environmental conservation and restoration.

The Mrdalsjkull ice cap, in southern Iceland, was visited in July and August 1975 by a party of seven, operating from a base camp on its western side, at the head of the Prsmrk valley. The objectives of the expedition were to record evidence of changes in the extent of the ice cap since its last re-advance (about 1850?) with a view to correlation with climatic data, and to examine the role of imagery from the Earth Resources Technology Satellite-1 (ERTS-1) in this context.

From the time of its discovery until the latter years of the nineteenth century Antarctica remained a terra incognita to the geologist, but in the early years of this century the Falkland Islands Dependencies attracted some academic interest, particularly from geologists. Undoubtedly this was mainly due to the fact that the Dependencies occupy one of the more accessible parts of the Antarctic continent and also bear a close geological relationship to South America.

In the polar desert of the high Arctic, underlain by continuous permafrost and commonly snow-covered for much of the year, the paucity of plant growth might seem unsurprising. Although low temperatures and lack of moisture exert a strong influence on plant life and can greatly diminish the rate at which plants can grow, these are nevertheless not the only factors involved. Lack of mineral nutrients, in an environment where chemical weathering is inhibited, may play an even greater part. In consequence, where nutrient-rich decaying animal bones are present, it is not uncommon to find growing upon them a luxuriant vegetation of mosses and vascular plants, together with less spectacular algae and lichens, which show up in striking contrast to the barren ground around them. These microhabitats, in turn, carry their own fauna of invertebrates. This paper examines, in detail, one such specimen and its flora and fauna — a 2000-year-old shed caribou antler from the ground surface at Cape Herschel, Ellesmere Island, 78°N.

In North American cold regions, terrestrial spill-response tactics have evolved through clean-up experience with crude oil and refined petroleum products. Alaska has developed response tactics as guidelines for clean-up of petroleum-based spills. Generic application of any response tactic without regard for season, site-specific conditions, and equipment limitations can further damage an ecosystem. For example, the practice of igniting and burning petroleum product spilled onto frozen tundra without consideration of the anthropogenic effect on the surface energy balance may actually increase the vertical migration of the spilled product. Prior to application of any mitigation strategy to a release of petroleum product, the movement of the product through freezing soil needs to be better understood. Case studies are presented, and lessons learned from them are discussed.

In Iceland, studies that integrate local perceptions about the landscape with scientific evidence of change have been few. This article presents a case study from southeast Iceland that has two main objectives. Firstly, ethnographic data is used to explore the human dimension of the Little Ice Age through perceptions of landscape and climatic change and to describe the impacts that these changes had on life and livelihood. Secondly, the paper critically assesses the coherence of the scientific record regarding the Little Ice Age glacial maximum with evidence gained from the ethnographic survey and the local historical record. Although climatic deterioration from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries ultimately affected farming viability, it was the interplay of climate with concomitant cultural and socio-economic factors that ensured effective strategies were emplaced to preserve life and livelihood in southeast Iceland. Furthermore, despite different trajectories of perception emanating from either the scientific or the local points of view, data from all sources are strongly coherent and point to a Little Ice Age maximum during the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. This study also illustrates that sensitive landscapes can ‘store memories’ through the cumulative accumulation of disturbances during periods of climatic variability, eventually reaching a critical threshold and inducing landscape instability, such as occurred during the nineteenth century.

Trends in the annual minimum sea-ice extent, determined by three criteria (absolute annual minimum, minimum monthly mean, and the extent at the end of August), were investigated for the Barents and western Kara seas and adjacent parts of the Arctic Ocean during 1984–1993. Four definitions of ice extent were examined, based on thresholds of ice concentration: >90%, >70%, >40%, and >10% (El, E2, E3, and E4, respectively). Trends were studied using ice maps produced by the Russian Hydro-Meteorological Service, Kosmos and Okean satellite imagery, and data extracted from published literature. During 1984–1993, an increasing trend in the extent of minimum sea-ice cover was observed in the Barents, Kara, and combined Barents–Kara seas, for all ice-extent definitions. Root-mean-square differences between hydro-meteorological ice maps and satellite-image ice classifications for coincident areas and dates were 15.5%, 19.3%, 18.8%, and 11.5%, for ice extensions El–E4, respectively. The differences were subjected to Monte Carlo analyses to construct confidence intervals for the 10-year ice-map trends. With probability p = 0.8, the average 10-year increase in the minimum monthly mean sea-ice extent (followed in brackets by the average increase in the absolute annual minimum ice extent) was 12–46% [26–96%], 31–71% [55–140%], 30–69% [26–94%], and 48–94% [35–108%] in the Barents Sea; 20–60% [32–120%], 10–45% [20–92%], 2–36% [13–78%], and 10–47% [8–69%] in the Kara Sea; and 9–43% [26–59%], 9–41% [30–63%], 8–41% [22–52%] and 15–51% [21–51%] in the combined Barents–Kara seas, for ice concentrations El–E4, respectively. Including published data from 1966–1983, the trend in minimum monthly mean sea-ice extent for the combined 28-year period showed an average reduction of 8% in the Barents Sea and a 55% reduction in the western Kara Sea; ice extent at the end of August showed an average reduction of 33% in the Barents Sea.

The volume variation of a glacier is the actual indicator of long term and short term evolution of the glacier behaviour. In order to assess the volume evolution of the Austre Lovénbreen (79° N) over the last 47 years, we used multiple historical datasets, complemented with our high density GPS tracks acquired in 2007 and 2010. The improved altitude resolution of recent measurement techniques, including phase corrected GPS and LiDAR, reduces the time interval between datasets used for volume subtraction in order to compute the mass balance. We estimate the sub-metre elevation accuracy of most recent measurement techniques to be sufficient to record ice thickness evolutions occurring over a 3 year duration at polar latitudes.

The systematic discrepancy between ablation stake measurements and DEM analysis, widely reported in the literature as well as in the current study, yields new questions concerning the similarity and relationship between these two measurement methods.

The use of Digital Elevation Model (DEM) has been an attractive alternative measurement technique to estimate glacier area and volume evolution over time with respect to the classical in situ measurement techniques based on ablation stakes. With the availability of historical datasets, whether from ground based maps, aerial photography or satellite data acquisition, such a glacier volume estimate strategy allows for the extension of the analysis duration beyond the current research programmes. Furthermore, these methods do provide a continuous spatial coverage defined by its cell size whereas interpolations based on a limited number of stakes display large spatial uncertainties. In this document, we focus on estimating the altitude accuracy of various datasets acquired between 1962 and 2010, using various techniques ranging from topographic maps to dual frequency skidoo-tracked GPS receivers and the classical aerial and satellite photogrammetric techniques.

During a late winter and early spring oceanographic voyage south into the Weddell Sea the icebreaker RV Polarstern first encountered patches and bands of loose floes in 58°S; these increased over the next 150 km to form closed ice pack which extended 1000 km to the coast. Along the coast the ship encountered almost continuous shore leads and polynyas that formed repeatedly despite persistently low air and sea temperatures. These areas of open water, which are generally visible in USA NOAA and USSR METEOR satellite photographs, form under the action of strong offshore winds that carry the main body of pack ice west and southwest. Grease ice, pancake ice and nilas spreading over the open water are rafted and ridged by windgenerated stresses to double thickness or more; these kinds of ice were continually driven westward, accumulating in a distinctive zone along the eastern edge of the pack ice. Polynyas and leads narrow and disappear temporarily only when winds with northerly or westerly components bring the pack ice toward the land, and reform as soon as offshore winds predominate. Open water, often more than 15 km wide, was present close to the ship throught the spring voyage, facilitating oceanographic work as far south as 77°S. Polarstern's full icebreaking capacity was needed only occasionally when winds temporarily pressed the pack ice against the coast. The presence throughout early spring of both fast and pack ice, separated by a zone of thin ice or open water, is essential to large populations of Weddell seals, emperor penguins and whales in the area. The transect from the continent included ice pack that was undergoing early summer decay, characterized by differential expansion and melting which brought about a gradual decrease in concentration toward the ice edge.

During the Antarctic summers of 1958–59 and 1959–60, oceanographie survey work was carried out in the Ross Sea by members of the New Zealand Oceanographic Institute from HMNZS Endeavour. Photographs of the sea bed were taken at nine of the forty-nine stations occupied, and at seven of these stations bottom samples were taken with trawls and grabs.