The Antarctic continent and its off-lying islands are probably the part of the world least disturbed by man. If all human activity beyond latitude 60°S ceased, all that would remain would be the remnants of scientific stations and a few dilapidated structures associated with Antarctic whaling when it was a land-based industry. Many hold the view that efforts should be made to retain this near-pristine condition and there is therefore widespread opposition to all forms of commercial enterprise in the Antarctic, including tourism. While there may be grounds for opposing the harvesting of living resources because of the possibility of over-exploitation, and for opposing the extraction of Antarctic minerals because of the danger of irreversible environmental damage, opposition to tourism, especially as there are no facilities in the Antarctic specifically designed for their benefit, seems more difficult to justify.

The commercial harvest of Northern Fur Seals (Callorhinus ursinus)breeding on the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea has gone on with few interruptions for almost 200 years. Since 1910 this harvest has been carried out exclusively by the US federal government acting as an operating authority. At the same time the management of all Northern Fur Seals, those associated with Ostrov Tyuleniy [Robben Island] and Komandorskiye Ostrova [Commander Islands] as well as the Pribilofs, has been subject to the provisions of a series of international agreements dating back to 1911. These provisions also apply to small breeding populations of Northern Fur Seals on several of the Kuril'skiye Ostrova [Kuril Islands] and on San Miguel Island in the eastern North Pacific (US National Marine Fisheries Service, 1980, p 10–12). The most recent in this series, the Interim Convention for the Conservation of Northern Fur Seals of 1957, formally expired on 14 October 1980. But on the same date, the parties to the 1957 Convention (Canada, Japan, the Soviet Union and the United States) initialled a Protocol extending the Convention, with some minor modifications, for another four years. The Protocol is currently awaiting ratification by Japan and the United States, a process that may take some time. In the interim, the parties are proceeding under an informal agreement to act as though the Protocol were in force, although this may become increasingly difficult if ratification does not occur by the summer of 1981 when the next harvest would normally occur.

In part 1 of this article (Polar Record, Vol 20, No 124, January 1980, p 3–17) we examined the troubled course of relations between captains Horatio T. Austin and William Penny during the early stages of their expeditions in search of Sir John Franklin in 1850–51. In this second part, we shall examine the climax of their uneasy cooperation, namely a prolonged dispute which took place throughout the course of 11 August 1851; then we shall look at the consequences of this dispute after their return home to Britain, including the setting up of the Arctic Committee to resolve the differences between them, and the controversial aftermath of the committee's inquiry.

Aleksandr Vasil'yevich Kolchak is undoubtedly best remembered by history for the role he played in the Russian civil war, and especially for his role as ‘Supreme Ruler of All the Russias’, in sole command of the White Russian armies in Siberia and with his seat of government at Omsk (Fleming, 1963, p 111). Probably the best-known incident of his entire career is the one that ended it: in the early hours of 7 February 1920, by the light of a lorry's headlights, he was executed by a Bol'shevik firing squad beneath the walls of Irkutsk prison, and his body bundled through a hole in the ice of the Ushakovka, where it flows past the prison to its confluence with the Angara (Fleming, 1963, p 216; Grondijs, 1939, p 55).

In 1850, five expeditions sailed for Baffin Bay with the common purpose of searching the Canadian Arctic for Sir John Franklin's missing North-west Passage expedition. They were all headed for different destinations and should have found themselves wintering many hundreds of miles apart; but, as chance would have it, three of them, led by Captain Horatio T. Austin, RN, Admiral Sir John Ross and the whaling master William Penny, were thrown together by ice conditions and by events. They wintered in close proximity to one another and were obliged to divide among themselves the search of the surrounding area. Ross's little private venture was too poorly equipped to contribute much, but the other two achieved very promising results: Austin's men discovered the first traces of the Franklin expedition on Devon Island and, in cooperation with Penny, located Franklin's first winter quarters on Beechey Island. In the following spring, sledge parties went out to explore hundreds of miles of new coastline; Austin found no further trace of Franklin, but Penny found persuasive evidence to suggest that the missing expedition had sailed up Wellington Channel (as, indeed, it had done, though it had not remained in that area). With the work of the travelling parties concluded, and after some conversation between Austin and Penny on 11 August 1851, all three expeditions set course for home.

On 27 September 1919, having destroyed most of their military equipment to prevent it from falling into the hands of the Bolsheviks, the last of the allied troops involved in the ‘Intervention’ at Arkhangel'sk led by General Edmund Ironside were evacuated from the city by sea. The White forces of General Yevgeniy K. Miller were then left to face the Bolsheviks alone (Strakhovsky, 1971, p 229; Silverlight, 1970, p 256; Maclaren, 1976, p 121; Halliday, 1961, p 208). The outcome was inevitable and could only be a matter of time, but when the final collapse of the White regime in Arkhangel'sk did occur, it was accompanied by one of the most bizarre episodes in Arctic marine history.

The Australasian Antarctic Expedition, 1912–14, led by Douglas Mawson, encountered incredibly strong, persistent katabatic winds at Cape Denison and along the coastal stretches of Terre Adélie and George V land (Fig 1). The mean wind speed at Cape Denison was 19.3 ms−1 [43.2 mph] which far surpassed all previous surface wind records. The French expedition of 1950–52 to Port Martin, some 60 km west of Cape Denison, provided confirmation of extraordinary windiness of the region. ordinary windiness of the region. According to Mather and Miller (1967), the winds at coastal Terre Adélie and George V Land are about 70 per cent greater than those recorded at stations similarly located at the foot of the steep ice escarpment. Table 1 lists the mean monthly resultant winds at Cape Denison and Port Martin, along with four other coastal stations known to be influenced by katabatic winds. Included in the table is the record of Dumont d'Urville, situated along the same coastal stretch as Cape Denison and Port Martin. Despite its location on an island 5 km from the base of the ice slopes, Dumont d'Urville frequently experiences strong katabatic winds comparable to most stations located at the base of the steep coastal ice slope. Its wind record reflects the strong katabatic component along Terre Adelie and George V Land.

When oil was discovered at Prudhoe Bay on Alaska's North Slope in 1968, the Eskimo villages of the region scattered around the ten-billion-barrel oil field were similar to most other rural native villages in the state: poor and isolated, with high unemployment, little or no prospect for local economic development, and dependent on federal and state programmes for minimum levels of education, medical care, and other services. Soon after the Prudhoe Bay discovery, however, Eskimo leaders on the North Slope began taking steps toward creation of a borough—a form of local or regional government in Alaska somewhat like a county elsewhere in the United States, but potentially having more extensive powers of taxation and regulation, and greater independence from the state government, than county governments typically possess. Incorporated in 1972, the North Slope Borough covers an area of 228 800 km2 and makes up about 15 per cent of the land area of Alaska. Within its boundaries lie the 93 435 km2 National Petroleum Reserve and most of the 35 560 km2 Arctic National Wildlife Range; both of these areas are under the jurisdiction of the federal Department of Interior. Located between these two federal land areas is the Prudhoe Bay oil field complex, which occupies state lands leased to the oil companies. Extending south from the oil field and crossing the borough's southern border is 270 km of the 1 270 km trans-Alaska oil pipeline.

In the Foreword to the first issue of Polar Record the editor wrote: ‘In the first place an attempt will be made merely to record the chief polar events of the preceding six months; but it is hoped that the scope of the journal will gradually be extended. The main body of The Polar Record, therefore, is a resume of polar news extracted from the best available sources’. This was a formidable task even in 1931, and a cursory glance at the latest volume indicates the tremendous growth and advances that have taken place since then. It is an impressive record and to mark the journal's 50th anniversary I shall use this information to make a general comparison of British polar activities, and the driving force behind them, in the pre- and post-war periods.

Only recently has the importance of politics in northern resource development been apparent. Governments, resource companies, and the public thought that lack of technology would be the major obstacle in the way of exploiting non-renewable resources in northern areas. The political difficulties encountered by British Petroleum and its Alaska North Slope partners, when trying to obtain government approval for the trans-Alaska (Alyeska) oil pipeline in the late 1960s, were the first clear sign that there exist widely varying political attitudes towards non-renewable resource development in northern lands (Arnold and others, 1976). Native groups in Canada's Northwest Territories were later successfully to argue their case against a Mackenzie valley gas pipeline before the public and a special inquiry (Morton, 1978). The attitude of the Canadian public towards the native position was sympathetic and open to compromise. Recent political emphasis in northern North America has been on the impact of non-renewable resource development upon native peoples and the environment. This has been true of Greenland but less so of North Norway (Nord Norge). Political attitudes over Svalbard have focused almost exclusively upon the international implications of non-renewable resource development (Sollie and others, 1974).

The fascination of the polar regions for the people of southern climes has always rested on the aura of mystery created by inaccessibility and the sense of prospective freedom offered by lands that were supposedly not claimed or utilized. Later, the intensive use of Arctic lands by their aboriginal inhabitants became clearer to those southerners who took the time to live for long periods in the Arctic, especially those whose opinions were open to the reality of what they observed around them. The Antarctic did not, of course, have a resident population to influence perceptions and has thus created a very different range of interests.

The object of trying to ascertain how environmental concerns are being faced in the Soviet northlands is twofold. On the one hand, it may be interesting to compare the Soviet experience with that of other countries having the same environment; on the other, these areas are very seldom visited, in particular by foreigners, so they are in no sense a shop window and may therefore be a good guide to the real situation in the country.

Benjamin Leigh Smith was born on 12 March 1828 at Whatlington, East Sussex, a son of Benjamin Smith (1783–1860). The family into which he was born carried a strong independent line of thought and adherence to often unpopular views from one generation to the next. William Smith, our subject's grandfather, was a staunch supporter of William Wilberforce and his advocacy of the abolition of slavery. William also supported the views of the American rebels and refused to seek compensation for the loss of family estates in Savannah after the Declaration of Independence. William's son Benjamin, a friend of Thackeray and Member of Parliament for Norwich, 1834–37, was a radical politician and advocate of the repeal of the corn laws. Benjamin senior, a convinced Unitarian, had strong views on the education of his children, and when very young they were taught in what, even now, might be regarded as a progressive manner. A committee, headed by Smith and Lord Brougham, gave funds for the Westminster Infant School which provided elementary education for about 100 poor children in the neighbourhood. Whenever young Benjamin and his brothers and sisters were in London they attended this school which was run by James Buchanan: he had begun life as a weaver in Lanarkshire, and ran the school with the aid of his wife on Swedenborgian principles. There was no corporal punishment; outbreaks of indiscipline were overcome by Buchanan calling all the children to dance together to the sound of his flute. The lack of conventional discipline scandalized the committee and they all withdrew their support leaving Smith to foot the bill. He generously gave £1000 for building baths and a small theatre at the school. Progress was made nonetheless, and Benjamin Senior was sufficiently impressed to invite this unconventional pedagogue to the family estates and continue his children's education during the holidays.

Satellite images of Ronne and Filchner ice shelves show a variety of surface features many of which are believed to indicate flow lines in the ice. Sufficient imagery is now available from Landsat satellites to plot these features from mosaics. Although some of the features have been recognized from aircraft, it was not until an overall view was provided that the true extent of the features and their relationship to the major ice streams became apparent. Using this evidence together with published ice thickness data from radio echo and seismic sounding, flow patterns within the ice shelves and tributary glaciers can be inferred.

George VI Ice Shelf is about 450 km long, 20–70 km wide, and averages 250 m in thickness. It is bordered by Alexander Island to the west and by the Antarctic Peninsula to the east (Fig 1). The ice shelf is fed by glaciers flowing westwards from the Palmer Land plateau. In summer (November to late February) the ice shelf undergoes considerable surface melting and meltwater lakes form over an area of 4 500 km2 between 70°15′S and 72°00′S. The lakes and pools vary in size from a few centimetres deep and several square metres in area to a few metres deep covering areas of several square kilometres (Fig 2). Most of the lakes are characteristically elongate and ribbon-like and hence are termed ‘ribbon lakes’. From mid November to late February the lakes are a major obstacle to sledge parties travelling over the ice shelf.

The Dry Valleys of southern Victoria Land, Antarctica, lying some 75 km west of McMurdo station, form an arid, ice-free area of roughly 2 500 km2. Since the late 1950s, this region has provided a remarkable opportunity for geoscientific studies of the exposed surface rocks, within easy reach of logistic support at McMurdo and Scott bases on Ross Island (Fig 1). As a result of a study of Lake Vanda in the Wright Valley, which began during the 1963–64 summer field season, scientists from the United States, New Zealand and Japan supported the view that further advances in our knowledge of the Dry Valleys would require an examination of the unconsolidated material, and the geothermal regime at lake sites, using direct shallow drilling techniques. As drilling techniques and interestin the geological history of the McMurdo region as a whole (encompassing the Transantarctic Mountains, Ross Island, McMurdo Sound and the Dry Valleys) developed, an international, multidisciplinary project—the Dry Valley Drilling Project (DVDP)—was conceived. By 1969 the US National Science Foundation (NSF) had decided to coordinate proposals from scientists wishing to drill the first intermediate and deep cores into the sediment and rock of Antarctica; the aim, a reconstruction of Antarctic geological history that traditional surface or near-surface studies alone could never achieve. Initially, the approach was to be a sub-surface physical, chemical and biological examination of theDry Valleys, but as the project developed it encompassed studies of the Ross Island volcanic complex and McMurdo Sound sediments.

The origins of the contemporary Newfoundland Harp and Hooded Seal fisheries can be traced back to the 16th and 17th centuries when ‘Biscainers’ (Spanish Basques) hunted whales, walrus and seals in the Gulf of St Lawrence and along the southern coast of Labrador (Prowse, 1895, p 43; Barkham, 1978). Throughout the next 400 years, as the seal fishery developed—both the landsmen and vessel operations—it became a major influence on the spread and character of settlement over a large area of Newfoundland and Labrador. By the middle of the 19th century, the large off-shore vessel operation had assumed the dominant role, and its contribution to the overall economic growth was second only to the cod fishery.

Stream icings are a unique type of river ice that form in a portion of a stream channel which freezes deeply enough to restrict channel flow. Icings are usually found in Arctic and sub- Arctic regions because of the prevalence of permafrost and seasonally frozen ground in these regions. Hydraulic pressure builds up at the point of constriction as the river ice and permafrost thicken during the freeze-up period (Fig 1). Water is forced up through cracks in the river ice and freezes upon exposure to the cold air. This process continues in successive overflows until the source of water is exhausted.