Great improvements have taken place in the last few years in the dressing of hair seal pelts for furs and the market for these furs has diversified and expanded.Consequently, the catching of hair seals of all species has intensified and the stocks of Harp Seals (Pagophilus groenlandicus)and Hood Seals (Cystophora cristata) of the North Atlantic, particularly, are under heavy pressure

Until the early 20th century, exploration of the Arctic Basin was hindered by the lack of vehicles that could traverse ice and water as well as cross leads and pressure ridges. This lack affected not only movements of explorers themselves but also the transport of food, supplies, and the equipment required to sustain life in an inhospitable environment. In 1925, however, an aircraft made the first successful landing on pack ice and ushered in an era of scientific stations on the pack ice itself.

The analysis of international and national cooperation interprets relations between states, international organisations and indigenous peoples as currently being constructed in terms of political practices. Through practical work in their organisations (IPOs), indigenous peoples are building up a joint agenda to further their social and economic interests. This process is accompanied by a transformation of the agenda of sovereign states and subordinate government bodies as well as by the establishment of partnerships with indigenous peoples through their legally recognised organisations that have become new political actors. New methods are emerging in which these practices can evolve in the most efficient way: the recognition of IPOs as equal partners in the decision-making process; the allocation of resources to facilitate their participation; the incorporation of traditional knowledge; the accommodation of indigenous priorities; joint initiatives; and other collective actions. The intergovernmental forum of the Arctic Council may serve as a positive model in which both governments and indigenous peoples collaborate. IPOs fully participate in the regional decision-making process, and through building up a new collective identity, reach out to high-level international organisations and events such as the World Summit on Sustainable Development and the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. In Russia, at the national level, the process has been less successful than elsewhere. This formation of collective identity is connected to two processes: one is a search for new opportunities of interaction with the state in the legal and governmental sphere: the other comprises regional cooperation and local interpretation of sustainable development. This is an INDIPO project paper (Tennberg 2006).

Throughout northern Eurasia, the presence of reindeer is a complicating factor in the consideration of interactions between vegetation and climate. The ability to interpret future changes in these interactions will depend on access to maps of sufficient detail to represent aspects of vegetation distribution relevant to reindeer grazing, amongst which we particularly identify lichens and shrubs. Such maps, if they are to have circumpolar coverage, can only feasibly be produced on a routine basis using satellite imagery having wide swaths but comparatively coarse resolution. This paper presents qualitative and quantitative comparisons between three such maps, and two more detailed vegetation maps compiled from fieldwork and from recent field-trained satellite image analysis, all for a study area in the Nenets Autonomous Okrug, Russia. It is shown that, despite its high degree of generalisation, the Circumpolar Arctic Vegetation Map provides the best representation of the vegetation in the study area amongst the three circumpolar land-cover maps that were examined, but that none of the three is entirely satisfactory. While the adequate representation of shrubs and lichens currently continues to depend on the analysis of field data or high-resolution satellite imagery which is unsuitable for circumpolar mapping, it is suggested that the prospects for satellite-based circumpolar vegetation mapping capable of including these components is promising.

The University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS) is a unique institution with a history that is closely related to Norwegian policy regarding Svalbard, and to clever development of a highly specialised Arctic university institution by all the Norwegian universities. In practical terms, Norwegian sovereignty on the archipelago as confirmed by the Treaty of Svalbard of 1920 and regulated by the Svalbard Law of 1925, is maintained by the presence of Norwegian civil authorities and communities. Today, the “capital” Longyearbyen with its 2100 inhabitants is a modern hub for industry, education, research, logistics and tourism. Founded in 1993, UNIS has become a main contributor to this community, generating some 20% of the total economic activity. A prime motivation for establishing UNIS was to provide a supplement and alternative to the unprofitable, heavily subsidized coal mining industry, by using the location for research based education. In 2015, the mining company Store Norske Spitsbergen Kullkompani (SNSK) met with deep crisis again and significantly downscaled its coal production and work force. Thus, UNIS may play an even more important role as a cornerstone of the local community in the future. This paper discusses the establishment and development of UNIS, its organisation, capacity, and academic production in terms of student graduation and its scientific output, just as its future potential for growth is evaluated. Finally, we discuss the increasingly important role of science and education in Norwegian Svalbard policy.

During an intense period of only 14 months, from June 2010 to August 2011, six major cooperation agreements between oil companies were announced in Russia. Almost all of these partnerships involved offshore projects, with an international oil company as one of the partners and Rosneft as the other. The agreements were concentrated along Russia's Arctic petroleum frontier, and the three that survived the longest involved oil or gas extraction in the Arctic. This article analyses and compares the contents and contexts of the agreements, to ascertain what they have to tell about access for international companies to Russia's offshore petroleum resources and the influence of competing Russian political actors over the country's petroleum sector. The article argues that the new partnerships did represent an intention to open up the Russian continental shelf, and that the agreements were driven and shaped by a series of needs: to secure foreign capital and competence, to reduce exploration risk, to lobby for a better tax framework, to show the government that necessary action was being taken to launch exploration activities, to improve Rosneft's image abroad, and either to avert or prepare for future privatisation of state companies such as Rosneft.

This is a follow-up to the article ‘Could Captain Scott have been saved? Revisiting Scott's last expedition’, published in this journal in January 2012. Additional research in the expedition's primary documents reveals that there was a clear opportunity for One Ton depot to have been re-stocked with dog food in January 1912, preparatory to the final relief journey to meet the polar party that February, and that the dog driver Cecil Meares failed to follow Scott's relevant orders. The consequences will be examined in this article. All distances are given in geographical miles.

Henry Grinnell (1799–1874), a retired New York shipping magnate, maintained for 20 years a correspondence with Jane Franklin, wife of the British explorer Sir John Franklin whose ships Erebus and Terror were lost in the Arctic some time after 1845. Grinnell financed two United States expeditions and two searches by Charles Francis Hall to the Arctic to collect information on the fate of the Franklin expedition. Grinnell's letters, now held in the archives of the Scott Polar Research Institute, form the basis of this article.

After World War II (WWII), the USSR acquired a whaling flotilla as war reparations from the Germans. This event was the beginning of Soviet whaling in the Antarctic. It also motivated the USSR to sign the 1946 International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling and to use its whaling operations to exercise leverage with regard to political advantage in any future discussions on an international regime for the Antarctic.

After loading stores at Göteborg and Oslo, the expedition sailed from London on 23 November 1949 in the chartered Norwegian sealing vessel Norsel, G. Jakobsen, master. After calling at Cape Town, where P. G. Law of the Australian Department of External Affairs and J. A. King of the Union Weather Bureau of South Africa joined the vessel as observers, the Norsel headed south on 27 December to meet the Norwegian whaling factory Thorshovdi, which was carrying an advanced party of five men, with sixty dogs and some heavy equipment. An unexpectedly wide detour had to be made across the South Atlantic as the Thorshevdi was at that time in the Scotia Sea.

Today the north is no longer remote and insulated from the demands of modern society, and northern Quebec is no exception. Principal threats to the environment come from mining, pipeline construction and hydro-electric developments. In the negotiations that are going on today between the native peoples, who are trying to protect what is left of their culture, and the developers from the south, there is a large divergence of opinion about what is important. When the native peoples are asked to document their use of natural resources in the courts they find themselves at a great disadvantage due to the lack of written history about their activities. The value of renewable natural resources that have sustained indigenous populations for thousands of years is difficult to quantify and can easily be made to look insignificant in comparison to the often exaggerated benefits of development proposals. For this reason it is important to make available whatever factual information there is and to present it in an unbiased manner.

The Antarctic environment has undergone significant local environmental damage and degradation, with nations rebuilding, expanding, or developing stations and bases. The Australian Antarctic Division's ten-year (1985–95) A$76.704 million programme of rebuilding and expanding stations in Australian Antarctic Territory is representative of a continent-wide increase in station numbers and impact, increasing station size, human numbers, lengths of roads, buildings, waste material production, and energy requirements. Environmental planning and impact assessment have not been incorporated in official decision-making; human activities at Australian Antarctic Territory stations had serious impacts on the limited ice-free land and local flora and fauna. Casey, are-developed station, is examined with reference to environmental planning and management under Antarctic Treaty obligations and recent Australian environmental legislation. Recommendations include the setting up of an Australian Antarctic Resources Committee responsible inter alia for environmental planning and management, including regional and station management plans and cumulative and environmental impact assessment for all Antarctic operations.

Research on the demographic impacts of mining in sparsely populated areas has focused primarily on relatively large towns. Less attention has been paid to smaller villages, which may experience different impacts because of their highly concentrated economies and their small populations, making them more vulnerable to demographic “boom and bust” effects. This paper examines demographic change in four small villages in northern Sweden, which are located close to several mining projects but have evolved through different degrees of integration with or separation from mining. Using a longitudinal “resource cycle” perspective, the demographic trajectories of the villages are compared to understand how different types of settlement and engagement with mining have led to different demographic outcomes in the long term. While the four villages experienced similar trajectories in terms of overall population growth and decline, their experiences in relation to more nuanced indicators, including age and gender distributions and population mobilities, were different, and potential reasons for this are discussed. Due to data limitations, however, the long-term demographic consequences of mining for local Sami people remain unclear. The paper problematises this research gap in light of general concerns about mining impacts on traditional Sami livelihoods.

In 1950–1958 Ahiarmiut were relocated, in three stages from Ennadai Lake to Nueltin Lake, from Ennadai Lake to Henik Lake and from Henik Lake to Arviat (Eskimo Point). This paper presents the results of a workshop conducted with elders and youths in Arviat, in May 2006, on these events. The participants in the workshop were Job and Eva Muqyunnik, Mary Anautalik, John Aulatjut, Silas Ilungijajuk, Geena Aulatjut from Arviat, Andrew Alikashuak, from Whale Cove, and Mary Whitmore from Churchill. The workshop was set up from an anthropological perspective and focused on Ahiarmiut perspectives of the first three relocations. Comparing archival and oral materials, the paper confronts the strategies, choices and decisions of the administration of the Canadian federal government with the experiences and views of the Ahiarmiut participants. The paper explores the causes of the failure of the relocations, notably the discrepancies between the values of the administration and those of the Ahiarmiut as well as the lack of communication between those parties. The paper concludes that there is no convincing evidence of any agreement between the Ahiarmiut and the administration so the relocation effectively became a deportation causing great economic and cultural distress as well as loss of life to the Ahiarmiut.

The Arctic Circle Assembly has established itself as a forum for stakeholders from all around the globe to discuss Arctic affairs. This includes discussion about the future of the Arctic, impacts of climate change on local inhabitants and indigenous peoples, the natural environment and wildlife, geopolitical issues, international treaties, research projects, business-related risks and opportunities, etc. At this international conference, the interests of stakeholders vary greatly. Some want to reap the economic and strategic benefits of melting glacial and sea ice, while others want to reduce the negative impacts of climate change. It is therefore important to analyse the conference discourse in order to understand the main emphases of stakeholders, and if some express their views more loudly than others. Through greater weight of voice in the Assembly and beyond, some stakeholders have more impact on the development of a region that is of economic, geopolitical and environmental importance, not only for the northern hemisphere but globally.

In July 1945, the Secretary of State for the Colonies appointed me leader of the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey for two years, an appointment which brought a prospect of a free existence in the wide open spaces as compared with routine office life. I soon found this prospect fading over the horizon. For months I was tied to an office, early and late, surrounded by scores of papers, insistent questioners and a ceaseless telephone bell. All this was necessary before the stores were ordered, packed and dispatched and the staff appointed.

World War I has often been said to mark the end of the ‘Age of Imperialism’—the close of ‘that final surge of land hunger’ (Landes 1969) from 1880 to 1914 when much of the world's land surface, especially in Africa and the Pacific, was acquired by the major powers. Britain's large share was demonstrated by the predominance of red on pre-1914 maps, though in fact the British Empire achieved its greatest area after 1918; ‘… including India’, reported the 1920 Colonial Office List, ‘the Empire now extends over 11 million of square miles, or 91 times the area of the Mother Country’ (Mercer 1920). This study examines one specific part of British imperial policy in the immediate post-war years—one which, had it been fully implemented, would have increased the area by a further 40 per cent. In the view of L. S. Amery, Under-Secretary of State at the Colonial Office and one of Britain's leading politicians of the time, it was desirable that:

… the whole of the Antarctic should ultimately be included within the British Empire, and that, while the time has not yet arrived that a claim to all the continental territories should be put forward publicly, a definite and consistent policy should be followed of extending and asserting British control with the object of ultimately making it complete.