This Symposium on the Physics and Chemistry of Ice held in Cambridge, England, from 12 to 16 September 1977, was the third full-scale international symposium in this series, following one with the same title held in Ottawa in August 1972, the proceedings of which were published by the Royal Society of Canada (Whalley and others, 1973), and one in Munich in September 1968 (Riehl and others, 1969). An earlier informal meeting had been held in Erlenbach, Switzerland, in 1962, the proceedings of which were not published.
At the Ottawa symposium an international committee again assumed the responsibility of arranging the lime and place of the next meeting. It consisted of J. W. Glen (co-ordinator), U.K.; N. H. Fletcher, Australia; P.-F. Gobin, France; H. Gränicher, Switzerland; A. Higashi, Japan; G. L. Hofacker, Germany; G. Jaccard, Switzerland; W. B. Kamb, U.S.A.; and E. Whalley, Canada. It was this group who suggested that the symposium be held in the United Kingdom in 1977 and asked the International Glaciological Society to organize it, which they agreed to do. Some financial support for the Symposium was given by the British Petroleum Co. Ltd., and is gratefully acknowledged.
The Symposium was arranged through an Organizing Committee consisting of M. de Quervain (President, I.G.S.), J. A. Heap (Treasurer, I.G.S.), H. Richardson (Secretary General, I.G.S.), and J. G. Paren, and a Papers Committee consisting of J. W. Glen (Chairman), N. H. Fletcher, A. Higashi, C. Jaccard, W. B. Kamb, H. Richardson (Secretary), and E. Whalley. Papers were in three categories: invited papers, contributed papers, and recent work papers. Invited papers were requested by the Papers Committee and were chosen to provide a review of progress in various branches of ice physics and chemistry since the previous symposium. Contributed papers were selected by the papers committee from extended abstracts submitted by a deadline date. Recent work papers were selected from those submitted after that deadline in order to allow very recent and topical work to be reported. Extracts from the second circular of the Symposium giving full details of these arrangements were published in the Society’s news bulletin Ice, No. 51, 1976.
Papers in all three categories which were presented at the Symposium were considered for publication in the proceedings provided the full manuscript was received in time. The refereeing procedure was the same as for papers submitted in the usual way to the Journal of Glaciology, and this issue of the Journal contains these papers together with abstracts of the papers presented at the Symposium but not published (for whatever reason). For some recent work papers the editors have not received abstracts; in these cases there is no further record of the paper other than its title in the programme of meetings. Abstracts are also included for those contributed papers accepted for the meeting which, because of the absence of their authors, were not presented or discussed.
An edited version of the discussions which took place is also included. These discussions have been prepared by the Rapporteurs, whose names can be found in the programme of meetings. For Sessions 1–8, these are based on written contributions to the discussion handed in by participants in the discussion at the end of the session. The final general discussion has been edited from a tape-recording of the proceedings. All participants have been sent the draft edited version and given an opportunity to correct or up-date it.
The papers in this issue are approximately in the order in which they were presented at the Symposium so (hat papers on similar topics are together, and thus invited papers are dispersed through the volume and precede other papers on a similar topic.
