About half a million square miles of Labrador and Quebec lie in the Arctic and sub-Arctic north of the closed-crown, boreal forest. Although the boundary between the unbroken coniferous forest and the open lichen woodlands has only recently been denned accurately, it has been known for many years to correspond roughly to the 51° 30′ N. parallel except for a northern extension in the east to Lake Melville. This forest zonal division also marked approximately the northern boundary of the province of Quebec until the district of Ungava was incorporated into the province in 1912; in addition it forms the northern limit of logging operations by the pulp industry, and coincides roughly with the southern edge of the lake plateau that dominates the interior of the peninsula. Until the last few years the vast region was inhabited by less that 6000 Eskimos and Indians, a few traders, and, on the Labrador coast, small numbers of fishermen and their families.

An 18-strong international team is hard at work in South Georgia, undertaking the final phase of the world's largest rodent eradication project, run by the South Georgia Heritage Trust. Known collectively as ‘Team Rat’, its departure for South Georgia in January coincided with the discovery of a nest of five South Georgia pipit chicks (Fig. 1) in an area overrun with rats before being baited by the trust in 2013. The pipit is the world's most southerly songbird.

Natural resources of Svalbard, notably seal, walrus, whale, reindeer, polar bear and Arctic fox, were exploited through the 19th and early 20th centuries by both overwintering and seasonal hunters and trappers. Hunters also collected eggs and down of eider ducks to supplement their catches. Amounts of uncleaned down officially registered as imported to Norway ranged from 300–2600 kg annually (mean 1300 kg). The accuracy of these figures is discussed. Eider down accounted for 7–10% of the annual income of the trappers who wintered on the islands. Competition between trappers spending the winter and the crews of the sealers and whalers often resulted in an unorganized free-for-all collection of down and eggs, causing a steady decline of the eider population. The population was protected by legislation in 1963 and the designation of several bird sanctuaries in 1973, in which it was hoped that eider numbers would recover. It is not clear whether these measures have been successful: historical records have too many lacunae for a reliable calculation of the original size of the eider population which the trappers and sealers exploited.

The present study confirms that the auroras of the nightside oval population consist of two main types, namely storm and substorm aurora. Storm-type aurora, which is relatively infrequent, results from bombardment of the upper ionosphere by fast particle streams generated in the solar wind by cataclysmic solar events related to coronal mass ejections. The associated turbulent plasma that is injected into the magnetosphere produces great magnetic storms of world-wide dimensions that may last for days. In contrast, substorm aurora is a frequent (almost daily) occurrence that lasts for an hour or two around geomagnetic midnight. It is generated by the impulsive release of stored magnetospheric energy from the substorm onset region in the Earth's magnetotail and is associated with localised negative magnetic bays in the H (horizontal)-component of the Earth's magnetic field in the vicinity of the auroral oval.