Arctic human settlements experience formidable challenges from accelerating climate change and environmental transformations. While these towns have demonstrated adaptive resilience, the looming threat of local climate extremes raises concerns about the results of adaptation and mitigation efforts. With the further development of Arctic settlements, it is necessary to consider changes in local climatic conditions, shifting the adaptation focus from regional to local scales. The local climate perspective in this literature synthesis study is built upon constraints from physical climatology, focused on the climate and environment within and around the town of Longyearbyen, Svalbard. The study provides insights into Longyearbyen’s local climate dynamics, including physical mechanisms, climate localisation, factors and trends, as well as their implications. Three model pathways for development are discussed, centred on (1) industrial development, (2) public services, and (3) tourism and conservation. This categorisation is introduced to distinguish development scenario sensitivity to the local climate effects. The synthesis indicates that any development concentrated spatially will amplify local warming and climate change, as positive climate feedback predominate. The study emphasises the need for a comprehensive understanding of the environmental factors sustaining local climatic anomalies.

The research aims to reconstruct a transnational history of Finn Malmgren’s contribution to the exploration of the Arctic, with a specific focus on the polar air expeditions of Norge (1926) and Italia (1928). The analysis of archive sources consulted in Italy, Norway, and Sweden sheds light on some key aspects of these two expeditions. In particular, the study of numerous unpublished documents – from the correspondence with personalities such as Umberto Nobile and Anna Nordenskjöld to the contemporary testimonies of Adalberto Mariano and Filippo Zappi – offers new insights into issues such as the international meteorological cooperation during the preparation of the Norge expedition and the march on the pack of Malmgren, Mariano and Zappi.

During the ill-fated 1897 Andrée balloon expedition, Nils Strindberg allegedly dropped a small tin containing a last message for his fiancée onto the island Fuglesongen in northwestern Svalbard, as the expedition crew passed over it in their hydrogen balloon, Örnen. Despite at least one lengthy search on Fuglesongen, the tin has never been found. This paper investigates the hypothesis that the tin was accidentally dropped onto Klovningen, a neighbouring island similar in size and shape, situated approximately 2.4 km east of Fuglesongen. A re-analysis of Strindberg’s original handwritten notes from the balloon flight, along with other primary sources and meteorological analyses, suggests that a targeted search for the tin on Klovningen could be a promising next step in solving this enduring mystery.

There has been great popular and scholarly interest in the activities of non-Arctic actors in the Arctic region, and in the Arctic Council specifically. We find controversy around the activities of Observers in the Council, with some seeing challenges to Arctic states and others seeing positive co-operation. The Arctic Council is the preeminent governance forum for the Arctic region, consisting of the Arctic states (as of 2023, minus Russia) and six Indigenous peoples’ organisations. Non-Arctic states, intergovernmental organisations and non-governmental organisations can be Observers in the institution. Existing literature has examined the significance, interest and powers of these actors; this paper answers the research question, what do Observers actually do in the Arctic Council? To answer this question, this paper presents the results of content analysis of official Arctic Council Observer reviews and reports, which catalogue their activities. The answer may seem obvious: Observers observe. However, Arctic Council Observers do more than this simple function. This paper proposes that all of the activities of Observers fit into a typology of six types of activity. The ultimate finding is that Observers in the Arctic Council work with Arctic states to enhance institutional work around climate change and sustainable development; we see examples of positive co-operation that enhances regional governance. It is another example of peaceful international relations in the Arctic.

In the year 1900, Otani Kozui, along with three travel companions, ventured on a one-month Arctic cruise, visiting the Norwegian fjords, the North Cape, Spitsbergen (Svalbard) and Iceland. The turn of the 20th century was a formative time for early Arctic tourism, and the aura of exploration was still a part of the northern allure. While Otani and his friends were not the first Japanese to cross the Arctic Circle, they were seen among their contemporaries as holding the record for being the first Japanese to cross the 70th parallel, which became a badge of honour in the exclusive Arctic Circle Society that was established in Japan in the early 1930s. As one of Japan’s most important 20th-century explorers, Otani is well known for having collected and studied Buddhist treasures from across Central Asia and the Silk Road. This paper aims to establish the facts surrounding Otani’s Arctic cruise and the Arctic Circle Society, both of which have gone mostly unnoticed by contemporary scholars. The paper also discusses how Otani’s voyage – which contains elements of tourism, study and competition – should be perceived, both in the context of his legacy and the broader historical developments of the era.

“Antarctic Ambassadorship” has emerged as an important concept in tourism, conservationist, and polar research communities. This article investigates tourists’ perceptions of “Antarctic Ambassadorship” through surveys and interviews conducted during and shortly after their travel to Antarctica, from 2015 to 2018. Interpretations of the term “Antarctic ambassador” varied widely but most hesitated to identify themselves this way. Tourists were not sure how to enact “Ambassadorship” or whether the actions they did take would “count.” Our findings suggest that the industry has great potential to promote Antarctic Ambassadorship by providing concrete ideas about what Ambassadorship might entail and offering tools for tourists to take concrete actions. We suggest a shift towards a focus on “Antarctic Civics” that would educate travellers about how Antarctica is governed and which institutions are responsible for its conservation, in order to empower tourists to engage in political advocacy in addition to personal lifestyle changes.

Antarctica is often cast as a last wilderness, untouched by humans and set aside for peace and science. Yet it also has a nuclear past that foreshadowed a shift in human interactions with the continent, away from development and towards protection. This paper examines the discourse around the installation and the dismantlement of PM-3A, the first and only large-scale nuclear reactor to have been used on the Antarctic continent. Affectionately known as “Nukey Poo,” the reactor was greeted with optimism by the USA and was seen as a catalyst for a more comfortable and technologically advanced future for the humans at McMurdo Station. This techno-optimism spurred visions of a resource-rich Antarctic future. When it became apparent a decade on that the reactor was too costly and had been leaking, the narration shifted to centre on environmental protection, resulting in the removal of a mountainside of gravel in the name of ecological restoration. The reactor is gone, but not forgotten – the site is designated as a Historic Site and Monument under the Antarctic Treaty System. Spanning from the Cold War to the Madrid Protocol era, the story of Nukey Poo provides a useful lens through which to track the evolution of attitudes towards Antarctica and to reflect on imagined Antarctic futures.

In 1949, human skeletal remains discovered by RCMP Inspector Henry Larsen near Cape Felix, King William Island, Nunavut, were identified as an adult male of European ancestry and a member of the 1845 Franklin Northwest Passage Expedition. The identification has never been questioned and is considered significant to reconstructions of the fate of the Franklin expedition because the sailor’s death presumably pre-dated the desertion of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror in April 1848 and because no other human remains of expedition personnel have ever been found between Victory Point and Cape Felix. The aim of this study was to re-examine the basis on which the ancestry of the skeleton was interpreted to be European. A review of archival records revealed previously unpublished details concerning the location and context of the discovery, and re-assessments of the antiquity and of key morphological attributes of the bones suggest they are those of an adult male Inuk and have no connection to the 1845 Franklin expedition.

Between 1750 and 1850, at least twenty versions of the Greenlandic Bible were published through the efforts of Greenlandic catechists, Danish Lutherans, German Moravians, the Danish Bible Society and the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS). This article assesses the role of Greenlandic and other Inuit translators as they were engaged in the colonial project of devising a complete version of the scriptures in their own language. Using the relatively untapped correspondence of the BFBS, it considers how and why the status of Inuit translators changed over the course of the missionary translation project. In one response to the reception of new Bibles, Inuit people offered gifts of blubber to the BFBS to support translations for other mission communities. To understand the meaning of this exchange, this essay brings together the methodologies and perspectives of missionary linguistics. It uncovers the unique role played by Greenlandic and other Inuit translators and catechists, foregrounding their contribution to a successful national project, the creation of a national language for independent Greenland and the emergence of literate Christian communities. By reading along and against the grain of colonial archives, it seeks to recover something of the names and motivation of Inuit scripture translators.

Sir Clements Markham (1830-1916), secretary of the Royal Geographical Society for many decades, is best known for his role in shaping the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration and especially the career of his protege Robert Falcon Scott. His unpublished work of Franklin Expedition fiction, a 350-page handwritten manuscript held in the collection of the RGS, is an understudied artefact which has much to say about Markham’s life, work, and ideology. A work of fact-based history, yet also a fantasy on themes of chivalry, his 1899 novel James Fitzjames…, while occasionally mined for biographical information by scholars of the 19th-century Arctic, has never been fully evaluated on its own terms. An initial read reveals various preoccupations: Christian spirituality; the male body in extremis; loyalty to the imperial hierarchy; and a deep interest in establishing James Fitzjames as a heroic figure for posterity. In this paper, I aim to uncover various meanings embedded in this romance, place it into the ongoing literary afterlife of the Franklin Expedition, and demonstrate some of the insights it can offer regarding Markham’s role as a vital figure in the history of polar exploration.

A scruffy piece of paper covered in notes and dated sketches of snowflake segments has been found caught between the pages of a later book in Whitby Museum’s Scoresby archive. The paper had been cut and folded to secure it round the ship Esk’s logbook. Close examination shows pencil drawing beneath the 22 ink sketches, which can be linked to entries for May 1817 in the logbook and matched to completed snowflakes from William Scoresby Junior’s 1820 book An Account of the Arctic Regions. This is almost certainly the first indication of Scoresby’s process for drawing snowflakes at sea.

The paper also contains jottings on many topics that Scoresby was considering including in his book. Comparing these with the published work, his later fact checking was clearly meticulous.

While much work on expertise has explored the mobilisation and production of knowledge, the development of epistemic communities, and the mechanisms through which expertise operates – little work has been done exploring how expertise is understood across academic literature on particular regional cases such as the Arctic. In this article, I scope a broad literature review of the Arctic, seeking out how expertise has been depicted and framed in academic and theoretical literature. The results are framed around five different themes: (1) expertise serving the interests of great powers, (2) recognition of the overall importance of expertise in Arctic governance, (3) the purpose of experts, (4) science diplomacy and expertise: a murky barrier, and (5) how to study experts, but also find that Indigenous knowledge is often left out of literature that relies upon Western frameworks of expertise. This incongruity suggests that there are two competing conceptualizations of Arctic expertise, one in theory and another in practice – which has consequences for how the region and its expertise are narrated.

Historically, there have been two kinds of economic activities in northern Alaska. The first and oldest is the subsistence lifestyle of the Indigenous peoples. The second and more recent is the development of the oil and gas industry, which began in earnest in 1977 with the competition of the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline and construction of a new road, the Dalton Highway. Although first used only by commercial traffic for the oilfield, in 1994, the highway opened to the public and is now frequented by tourists travelling above the Arctic Circle. In this paper, we analyse the future of northern Alaska tourism by considering evolutionary economic geography and the area’s likely reduction in oil and gas activity. We consider how climate change may serve as a trigger, impacting tourism through the rise of last chance tourism, and conduct a scenario-based analysis. We argue that the oil and gas industry is likely to continue along its current path, exhausting accessible resources and innovating technology to push into new territories in the far north. However, should the culmination of extraneous factors render climate change a trigger, industry decline could be offset by investments that repurpose the area’s industrial heritage into tourism sites.

In 2021, the decision to close the last Norwegian coal mine on Svalbard was made, and with that, the Norwegian coal adventure on the archipelago came to an end. This was a result of a political process, which is the focus of this article. Drawing on fieldwork conducted during the fall of 2022, I argue that the political process of phasing out coal changed from a conflict over interests to a contest over symbolic capital. The article contributes to the understanding of Norwegian Svalbard politics and the “balancing act” that this represents. I focus on how power, in the form of shaping people’s perceptions and as prestige, influenced what interests prevail and why. The article addresses (1) why the decision to phase out coal was not made earlier, (2) what ultimately made this decision possible and (3) why and over what the key actors were still competing after the decision to phase out coal was made.

Pringlea antiscorbutica (Brassicaceae) and Azorella polaris (syn. Stilbocarpa polaris, Apiaceae) are endemic sub-Antarctic flowering plants of significant ecological and historical importance. Pringlea antiscorbutica occurs on Îles Kerguelen and Crozet, Prince Edward, and the Heard and MacDonald Islands; A. polaris on Auckland, Campbell, and Macquarie Islands. We examine the use of these unrelated species of “wild cabbage,” as scurvy remedies and sustenance for eighteenth–nineteenth-century sailors. We trace their European discovery, taxonomic treatment, morphological representation, and cultural association through the historical record. Scurvy killed more sailors during the sixteenth-nineteenth centuries than armed conflict and shipwrecks combined. Both plants were essential to the survival of sailors and formed a nutritious, carbohydrate-rich staple of their diets, however, attitudes to these plants were strongly influenced by cultural background. Use of P. antiscorbutica as a scurvy remedy was promoted by Cook and Anderson, leading to a greater historical legacy than A. polaris, and a unique contemporary research focus on the plant’s nutritional value and cultivation potential. In contrast, contemporary studies of A. polaris have been directed primarily at the plant’s protection. Pringlea antiscorbutica and A. polaris are intrinsically linked to human associations with the sub-Antarctic islands, which further increases their cultural and conservation value.

Few details are known about the fate of the Franklin Expedition after it departed England in 1845. What we do know is derived from the archaeological record, Inuit testimony and brief communications written in 1847 and 1848 from the Expedition. During the 1860s, Charles Francis Hall went to the Arctic in search of survivors, papers, and relics. During Hall’s second expedition, two Inuit testimonies emerged which reported unusual site(s) on the Westcoast of King William Island which were reputedly built by the Expedition. Hall believed these sites were either a burial site or a cemented document vault(s). The first testimony, recorded by Hall himself, was obtained from a Pelly Bay Inuk, Sŭ-pung-er, in 1866. The second was collected from Pelly Bay Inuit by members of Hall’s support team, including Peter Bayne, in Hall’s absence in 1868. Eventually, the second testimony was sold to the Canadian Government in the form of a report written by George Jamme after Bayne’s death in 1928. Until now, only extracts of the Jamme Report have been available. This paper describes the background to the Jamme report and presents it in its entirety along with critiques so that scholars in the future may have this tool.

The mysterious disappearance of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror while searching for the Northwest Passage under the leadership of Sir John Franklin in the 1840s led to more than thirty different expeditions seeking to find the lost ships and their 129-man crews. It also fostered the first and only use of wild animals as a means of communication in such a rescue operation. Since covering the vast search areas was challenging, if not impossible during sub-freezing winter conditions, some of the would-be rescuers turned to Arctic foxes as couriers of information that they hoped might direct the lost explorers to safety. Based on excerpts from the participants’ diaries and published reports from the period, and on the physical evidence that survives, this paper describes the role Arctic foxes were asked to play in one of the greatest (unsuccessful) rescue efforts ever undertaken in the Far North.