Between 1939 and 1945, plans were afoot in the Union of South Africa for the establishment of meteorological stations on Gough Island in the South Atlantic, and on one of the Prince Edward Islands in the southern Indian Ocean. Shortage of shipping and staff caused these plans to be shelved in 1945. In 1947, Field-Marshal Smuts, who was then Prime Minister of the Union, decided to annex the Prince Edward Islands without delay. These islands, which consist of Marion Island and the smaller Prince Edward Island, are situated in approximately lat. 47° S., long. 38° E., half-way between South Africa and Antarctica, and have always been regarded as British, although no records of any sort of annexation ceremony can be traced.

In December 1947, therefore, the frigate H.M.S.A.S. Transvaal recalled her crew from Christmas leave and sailed south. Bad weather delayed a landing for several days, but eventually, on 29 December 1947, the commanding officer of the Transvaal landed on a rocky beach on the eastern side of Marion Island and hoisted the South African flag.

Each Antarctic Treaty Consultative Party established its national Antarctic operating agency in circumstances that were unique to itself. For some of the original members of the Antarctic Treaty, the initial organisations have continued to act as their national Antarctic operators. New members have either delegated responsibility to existing government organisations or have established new bodies to implement their national Antarctic programmes. The organisations selected to assume responsibility for operating the individual national Antarctic programmes, although varied, possess similar attributes and fall into four categories. Thedistinguishing features of these categories are based on the extent of the functions and financial responsibilities adopted by the agencies. By establishing their nature, this study offers a framework for analysis and a basis for further research on the styles and trends in organising national Antarctic programmes.

This paper is a report on the preliminary work of a long-term study of the construction, use and cultural significance of kayaks among Greenlanders living in the Umánaq area of north-west Greenland.

During public hearings before the Norman Wells Project began, fears were expressed that the project would adversely affect consumption of country food. This note examines consumption of country food by native residents living in four communities in the impact zone of the project The proportion of country food in their diet did not diminish over its construction period, and may have increased slightly, mainly because residents maintained normal harvesting despite handicaps caused by the project. Other mitigating factors were that most construction occurred at a predominately non-native centre (Norman Wells), virtually no natives from the three native communities were employed full-time for the duration of the project, and most of their hunting area was well outside the pipeline impact zone.

At the Bonanza Creek Experimental Forest (BCEF), past ecological research has been directed at forest successional processes on the floodplain of the Tanana River and adjacent uplands. Research at the Bonanza Creek site continues on the mosaic of forests, shrublands, and wetlands in a wide variety of successional stages on the Tanana floodplain. This paper reviews research since 1988 into the capabilities of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) for monitoring, classification, and characterization of these forests using radar remote sensing and modelling techniques. Classifications of successional stages, obtained by use of different classifiers on multi-frequency and multi-polarimetric AIRSAR data, are contrasted; these classifications have been used to predict classification accuracies obtained with ERS-1 data, and to estimate the utility of an ERS-1 and RADARSAT combination for classification. Forest classifications, used in combination with ground-truth data for more than 50 forest stands, are used to summarize the distribution of biomass on the landscape. This will allow projections of future biomass. Monitoring of forest phenology, seasonality of flooding, and freeze–thaw transitions is ongoing. Also, direct monitoring of dominant tree species is demonstrating diurnal variation and interrelationships among environmental, physiological, and backscatter measurements.

In 1875, members of the British Arctic Expedition under the command of George S. Nares discovered two ancient-looking stone cairns on Washington Irving Island at the entrance to Dobbin Bay, eastern Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, Canada. At least one of these cairns was destroyed by the expedition members to construct their own cairn. The possibility that these cairns were built by Norse voyagers to Kane Basin is supported by the large number of Norse artifacts recovered from Thule culture Inuit sites in the Bache Peninsula region just south of Washington Irving Island. Surveys of the island have identified scattered boulders marking the location of the cairns, but the question of the builders' identity still remains a mystery.