The purpose of this paper is to report on the present status of the small but growing population of the Antarctic Fur Seal Arctocephalus gazella in the South Shetland Islands (Fig 1). The previous history of the sealing of this species is well documented by O'Gorman (1961, 1963), Bonner and Laws (1964) and Bonner (1964,1968). The current status of this and other species of fur seals, and the species of sea lions and true seals in the Southern Hemisphere, has been summarized by Laws (1973a). Bonner (1968) has made natural history and population studies on Antarctic Fur Seals in South Georgia, and present research here is being carried out by Dr M. R. Payne and two other colleagues of the British Antarctic Survey (Laws, 1973b).

The western Antarctic Peninsula (WAP) is a hotspot of rapid recent regional ‘climate change’. This has resulted in a 0.4°C rise in sea temperature in the last 50 years, five days of sea ice lost per decade and increased ice scouring in the shallows. The WAP shallows are ideal for studying the biological response to physical change because most known Antarctic species are benthic, physical change occurs mainly in the shallows and most research stations are coastal. Studies at Rothera Station have found increased benthic disturbance with losses of winter sea ice and assemblage-level changes coincident with this ice scouring. Such studies are difficult to scale up as they depend on SCUBA diving – a very spatially limited technique. Here we report attempts to broaden the understanding of benthic ecosystem responses to physical change by replicating the Rothera experimental grids at Carlini Station through collaboration between the UK, Argentina and Germany across Signy, Rothera and Carlini stations. We argue that such collaborations are the way forward towards understanding the big picture of biota responses to physical climate changes at a regional scale.

Mites (Acarina: Arachnida) have not colonised Antarctica and the sub-Antarctic islands by ballooning on air currents. All acarine records from Pacific and Southern Ocean aerial plankton represent dead coastal (hemi)-edaphic species or phoretics dislodged from their flying insect hosts. The few sub-Antarctic records of mites capable of ‘ballooning’ on air currents are all verified as being attributed to anthropogenic introductions.

The South Shetland Islands were discovered in 1819. Almost immediately the fur seal population was intensively exploited and this lasted through the early years of the 1820s, by which time seal numbers had been so depleted that sealing became uneconomic. Sealing was revived for both fur seals and Elephant seals at several periods later in the century. Sealers were put ashore in gangs and built makeshift shelters in which to live. Many of these have been identified on the South Shetlands, and a number have been excavated, though few with archaeological method. Fifty known sites are identified. The paper outlines the survey and excavation of two sites on Rugged Island by archaeologists from Australia and from the Chilean National Natural History Museum. One site relates to the sealing era of the 1820s, while the second may be associated with a marooned sealing gang in the 1870s. The nature of the occupation sites on the South Shetlands is analysed in relation to the social and operational context of the merchant navies of Britain and the USA in the nineteenth century. This is seen as a more directly relevant context for assessing physical evidence than is the application of theories of global capitalist systems.

Preserving biodiversity and establishing healthy and thriving populations of predator animals are the expressed aims of many wildlife and ecosystem conservation projects and initiatives. However, such conservation strategies are often in conflict with the traditions, practices and land-use priorities of local communities. This article concentrates on the situation concerning the predation of reindeer (mainly by wolves) in Finland's southeast reindeer herding area and its immediate vicinity, but makes reference to the broader situation of predation and reindeer herding in Finland. Based on analysis of statistics and interviews with local stakeholders, the research findings refer to the intermingled contradictions related to conceptual, statistical and other management relevant knowledge and resulting problems, for example, in conservation hunting licensing. The article concludes that the wolf comprises a complex case for nature conservation initiatives and sustainable reindeer husbandry and that, in practice, it has particular implications compared to other policy approaches to dealing with the problem of animal predators. The article ends with some theoretical considerations as to whether we can improve our understanding of modern human-environment relations by deriving ideas from the actor-network theory debates.

During December 1978 the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) undertook its sixth and final season of long-range airborne radio echo sounding (RES) and magnetometry in Antarctica in cooperation with the US National Science Foundation Division of Polar Programmes (NSF-DPP) and the Electromagnetics Institute of the Technical University of Denmark (TUD). The 1978–79 season (DF–79) was part of a long-term programme of glaciological and geophysical investigation of the Antarctic ice sheet (Drewry and Meldrum 1978a; 1978b). The broad aims have been to extend a 100-km grid network over Antarctica for a study of surface form, thickness, internal structure, rheology, thermodynamics, electrical properties, basal conditions and processes, and sub-ice geology.

The archipelago of the lies Kerguelen is a group of volcanic islands in the Indian Ocean roughly equidistant from the Malagasy Republic, Australia and Antarctica. It is formed of around 300 islands amounting to some 7 000 km. The main island alone, usually called “Grande Terre”, covers nearly 6 000 km. Descriptions of the archipelago have been given by Paulian (1953) and Aubert de la Rue (1954). Several attempts have been made to acclimatize animals to these islands. Being entirely without terrestrial mammals they have, during recent centuries, attracted the attention of sealers and whalers, anxious to maintain a supply of fresh meat near their sealing and whaling grounds. At the beginning of this century, various attempts at economic exploitation led to the introduction of some domestic species. More recently, several similar attempts have again been made but these have sprung more from a desire to populate these empty spaces than from any systematic programme of acclimatization. The more recent introductions have extended even to the islands’ streams.

Since the exploration of Antarctica began, procedures for dealing with human wastes have changed considerably. The establishment of research stations made it necessary to provide for sewage disposal. However, the introduction of advanced wastewater treatment processes has been driven largely by an intensifying concern to protect the Antarctic environment. A key step was the adoption by Antarctic Treaty nations of the so-called Madrid Protocol, in which minimum standards for sewage treatment and disposal are prescribed. The provisions of this protocol are not particularly onerous and some countries have elected to go beyond them, and to treat Antarctic research station wastewater as they would at home. Transferring treatment technologies to Antarctica is not simple because the remoteness, isolation, weather and other local conditions impose a variety of unusual constraints on plant design. The evolution of advanced treatment plant designs is examined. Most countries have opted for biofilm-based processes, with Rotating Biological Contactors (RBC) favoured initially while more recently contact aeration systems have been preferred. Sludges are now generally repatriated, with a diversity of sludge dewatering techniques being used. The evolution of treatment process designs is expected to continue, with growing use, especially at inland stations, of sophisticated processes such as membrane technologies and thermally efficient evaporative techniques.

Repetitive surveillance by polar-orbiting meteorological satellites can monitor the distribution, variability, and behaviour of sea ice in both Arctic and Antarctic regions. This article reviews some of the applications of Nimbus satellite data to the polar regions. For a good review of applications of NOAA (formerly ESSA) satellite data to the polar regions, see Swithinbank (1969, 1970, 1971).

Russia has dropped rocket stages fuelled with unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH) into the Barents Sea and the North Water Polynya—areas of considerable ecological importance—on ten occasions since 2002. The stages come from SS-19 intercontinental missiles that have been re-purposed for launching satellites. UDMH is a highly toxic chemical that has caused widespread health and environmental damage in Kazakhstan and Russia as a result of its extensive use there as a rocket fuel. Not all of the fuel on-board is consumed during a launch and the residual fuel tends to escape the incoming stages and form aerosol clouds that drift over large areas. This dropping of the rocket stages is of considerable concern to the Inuit of Canada and Greenland, who only learned about the practice in 2016. It is also a violation of several treaties as well as customary international law. At least two more launches of UDMH-fuelled rockets on the same trajectory are currently planned—even though alternative non-toxic rocket systems exist.

Living in close relationship with the Siberian environment, for several decades the Tungus (Evenk and Even peoples) have been noticing numerous changes in climate, flora and fauna. Based on fieldwork among reindeer herders, hunters and fishermen in Yakutia, the Amur region and Kamchatka, this paper explores how climate change is perceived, and how it causes economic, social and ritual changes. It questions the modifications of the economic and religious human-environment relationships through various aspects. It analyses the indigenous perception of a link between the environment and identity and the indigenous notion of adaptation and vulnerability. It also compares their adaptive strategies that either use old techniques, or trigger mutations. In this context, the notion of reciprocity seems to be disappearing and a new notion of time-space in managing the environment is appearing. This paper analyses the religious changes, such as the creation of new rituals and millenarian narratives or the rebirth of shamanistic legends.

Although there is increasing recognition that traditional ecological knowledge can make important contributions to environmental and resource-management issues, there are also indications that its use in co-management committees has not been straightforward. Three main sets of challenges have been documented — differences in knowledge systems between western scientific and traditional ecological knowledge, the relatively powerful position of western science and scientists in comparison to traditional ecological knowledge and its users, and challenges in documenting and presenting traditional ecological knowledge. This paper reports the results of a study that surveyed members of co-management committees established in Nunavik, northern Quebec, pursuant to the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement to explore their perspectives on these issues. Three elements emerged from this study. They are the complex and sometimes contradictory nature of the views that committee members held about traditional ecological knowledge, the active role of the Inuit in attempting to shape how traditional ecological knowledge is used in decision-making, and the need for documentation of, and research funding for, the collection of traditional ecological knowledge.

A set of simple criteria for visual assessment of the effects of low-intensity fieldwork in ice-free areas of Antarctica was developed. These criteria were tested by using them to examine the impact of soil science investigations, both immediately and some time after disturbance, at Marble Point and at Cape Evans, on the shores of McMurdo Sound, Antarctica. The use of these criteria showed that for some types of impacts there had been a marked recovery of the surface with time, ranging from 22 months to 30 years. This was apparently due to repeated freeze and thaw of the soil surface and, to a lesser extent, to the influence of wind, which had partly or completely obliterated some of the earlier disturbances. More durable features remained, while deeper surface impressions, such as old soil inspection pits and vehicle tracks, showed little recovery after more than 30 years. Some biological colonisation of areas disturbed 30 years previously was occurring.

An important component of northern research in Canada has been a strong emphasis on local participation. However, the policy and permit landscape for community participation therein is heterogeneous and presents specific challenges in promoting effective partnerships between researchers and local participants. We conducted a survey of northern research stakeholders across Canada in order better to understand the benefits and challenges associated with research partnerships with a view to informing northern research policy and practice. We found that local engagement at the proposal and research design phases, the hiring of community researchers and engagement of local persons at the results dissemination phase were important factors affecting success. Respondents also indicated a lack of social capital (trust and reciprocity) between researchers and communities as placing a negative impact on science partnerships. Overall, researchers were perceived to benefit more from research partnerships than their community counterparts. Partnerships in northern research will possibly require further decentralisation of power to achieve the policy objectives of local community participation. This could be achieved, in part, by allowing non-academic principal investigators to receive funding, or by involving communities in research priority-setting, proposal review and funding allocation processes.

The morphology of seven soil ciliate species from continental Antarctica was investigated using live observation and protargol impregnation. Observations on two populations of Protospathidium serpens corroborate the view that this species usually has a single, more-or-less nodular, macronucleus distinguishing it from P. muscicola, which possesses 10–30 nodules. The Antarctic specimens of Protospathidium terricola differ inconspicuously from the type population in that they are slightly larger, have fewer ciliary rows (17 vs 21), and the fragments of the circumoral kinety are less distinctly separated from each other. Spathidium seppelti nov. spec, resembles 5. bavariense, but has 100–200 macronuclear nodules and a conical depression in the dorsal third of the oral bulge. Odontochlamys wisconsinensis nov. comb, (basionym: Chilodonella wisconsinensis Kahl, 1931) has four right field kineties and an oral basket consisting of 14 rods; the dorsal brush is near the anterior margin and usually consists of four cilia. The Antarctic population of Pseudochilodonopsis mutabilis possesses a regular dorsal hump and only 12–14 (about 15 in Austrian type population) phary ngeal rods. Oxytricha opisthomuscorum has six dorsal kineties with long cilia and a buccal cirrus near the anterior end of the paroral membrane. The Antarctic specimens of Sterkiella histriomuscorum have fïve transverse cirri. Their morphogenesis differs slightly from that of a population having four transverse cirri in that the daughter's anlagen are more distinctly separated and some temporal sequences are different.

This commentary introduces a methodology and theoretical framework for studying how the tourism industry might balance the competing demands of economic growth and environmental governance. We focus on the “balancing act” Svalbard tourism industry must play among sometimes competing demands of climate change mitigation and emissions from tourism, and of strict Norwegian environmental management policy and demands for increased tourism. While these are specific to Svalbard, the balancing act of competing needs is the core challenge of the UN Sustainability Goals giving this research global and pan-Arctic relevance. Through collaboration between two tourism organisations, the Association of Arctic Expedition Cruise Operators (AECO) and Visit Svalbard and an interdisciplinary team of scientists, we will co-produce knowledge about how to innovate new opportunities while protecting the wilderness, the very backbone of tourism. This collaboration considers how policy, climate change, and local attitudes together may affect the tourism industry and helps to define and develop sustainable tourism operations and products. For instance, tourists may participate in environmental and community-related activities or “micro safaris” rather than a sole focus on charismatic megafauna. Policy discussions about tourism growth need to consider how local and national governments anticipate and navigate rapid social, political, and environmental changes.

This illustrated glossary of sea ice and associated terms is an abstract of a fuller illustrated glossary, also covering land ice terms, which the Institute has had in preparation for many years, and hopes to issue before long as a Special Publication. It is a development of an Admiralty glossary, published in 1953, with such modifications as seem to be required for international agreement.

Bowhead whale bones in prehistoric Thule Eskimo contexts have been examined since 1975 in the central Canadian Arctic. Approximately 10,500 bones, representing almost 1000 animals, have been counted on the shores of six adjacent islands. Comparisons of Thule-derived bowhead samples with live Beaufort Sea samples and Early Holocene samples indicate that Thule Eskimo hunters selected yearlings and two- to three-year-old subadults, to the almost complete exclusion of calves and adults. Almost all bowheads found at Thule sites measure 7–10 m in length, estimated by regression analyses based on Alaskan bowhead skeletons of known size. Archaeological bowhead bones represent several stages of past hunting and processing behavior, including selective hunting, beach flensing and meal/blubber caching, winter house construction, and bone re-use from house ruins. The availability and abundance of bowheads were primary determinants of Thule subsistence-settlement patterns in this region. Archaeological whale bones arc a nonrenewable cultural resource of the New World Arctic that deserve study and protection.

The article discusses the results of a three year research project studying international indigenous political activism using case studies from the Arctic. Drawing on two different disciplinary starting points, international relations and international law, the project addressed two interrelated questions. The first of these was how relations between states, international organisations and indigenous peoples have been and are currently constructed as legal and political practices; the second was how indigenous peoples construct their political agency through different strategies to further their political interests. These questions are addressed from the point of view of power relations. The power to act is the basic form of political agency. However, this power may take different forms of political action, for example, self-identification, participation, influence, and representation. The main conclusions of the article are: 1) indigenous political agency is based on multiple forms of power; 2) practices of power that enable and constrain indigenous political agency change over time; 3) power circulates and produces multiple sites of encounters for states, international organisations and indigenous people; 4) indigenous political agency is a question of acting; and 5) there are new challenges ahead for indigenous peoples in claiming a political voice, in particular in global climate politics.