In April 2017, Victoria University of Wellington launched ICE101X—Antarctica: From Geology to Human History—on the global edX platform. This Massive Open Online Course, or MOOC, attracted 5735 learners from around the world, who engaged with content about Antarctic science, history, geology, and culture, primarily through video lectures filmed in Antarctica. Analysis of feedback from learners in three iterations of the course, offered between 2015 and 2017 and culminating in ICE101X, revealed that learners enjoyed the immersive Antarctic field lectures and learning through a diverse set of disciplinary lenses, had some preconceptions about Antarctica that were challenged by the course content, and completed the course with a new sense of interest in and protection of Antarctica.

The eleventh successive annual United Nations discussion on the ‘Question of Antarctica’ took place at the close of 1993. In November the UN First Committee, guided by two reports from the UN Secretary-General, adopted a further resolution, which was adopted in December by the General Assembly as resolution A48/80. As usual, UN members, although displaying evidence of a wider international recognition of the regime's merits, proved critical of the Antarctic Treaty System. By contrast, Antarctic Treaty Parties (ATPs) remained reluctant to allow the UN the type of role in Antarctica advocated by their critics. ATPs, following the course adopted in 1985, still refused either to participate in the UN discussions or to vote. As a result, it proved impossible yet again to secure a consensus about either the ‘Question of Antarctica’ in general or the UN's role in Antarctica in particular. One significant advance in 1993 concerned the end of demands advanced since 1985 for South Africa's exclusion from Antarctic meetings, a change prompted by the dismantlement of the apartheid regime. The ‘Question of Antarctica’ is scheduled to be placed on the UN agenda in 1994.

In this article we survey descriptions of Christmas celebrations contained in the diaries and narratives of polar explorers (mostly British) from 1818 to 1912. We find that Christmas was a time almost universally associated with the display of positive emotions, although this was in the context of increased amounts of stress associated with the challenges of over-wintering at high latitudes. Firstly, we argue that Christmas was crucial to the well-being of expedition participants because it opened emotional channels that enabled them to cope with stress. Secondly, we argue that Christmas revealed a play space in which certain types of normally deviant behaviour were welcomed. Thirdly, we argue that Christmas was a major nutritional event for over-wintering crew members, satisfying a need for calories that was rarely met in the everyday rations.

After making a final landing with their hydrogen balloon on the Arctic pack ice on 14 July 1897 at 82°56′N 29°52′E, expedition members Salomon August Andrée, Nils Strindberg and Knut Frænkel began a slow march with very heavily laden sledges over the ice to try to reach a depot at Cape Flora. Two fundamental errors regarding where to go and what to bring sealed their fate. This note will explore the theory that, given the information they had at the time, the explorers should not have made these mistakes. In fact, the expedition members could have survived if they had instead travelled directly to their other depot at Seven Islands with more lightly laden sledges.

Tuberculosis was the major cause of death among Alaska Native peoples during the first half of the twentieth century, with a crude death rate estimated at 810 per 100,000. Apart from a few medical articles, not much is known of the impact of the disease on the people. This paper reviews published articles, unpublished reports by government teachers, hospital records and other materials for several Native villages in western Alaska from the period 1900–50. These archival sources suggest that tuberculosis was prevalent at the start of the century, that tuberculosis morbidity and mortality increased until the public health efforts of the 1950s and '60s, and that highest mortality rates were found among women between the ages of 15 and 35. Traditional cultural practices that brought people together for fatiguing activities in confined areas may have contributed to the spread of the disease. Public health efforts of federal teachers aimed to improve personal hygiene, household cleanliness and ventilation. Their efforts were thwarted by environmental and economic factors, primarily the limited amount of wood. Ultimately, the comments of these public officials may have reflected more their own moral beliefs than the actual etiology of the disease.

William Speirs Bruce (1867–1921) had two consuming passions throughout almost the whole of his life: Scottish nationalism and polar science. His early life in London and Edinburgh is seen as a prelude to polar oceanographic exploration, culminating in the success of the Scotia Antarctic expedition, 1902–04. His later life was frustrated by the limited achievements of the Scottish Spitsbergen Syndicate (which was founded to exploit the mineral resources of Svalbard), by a perceived prejudice against him in government and professional societies in London, and by the lack of support for his Scottish Oceanographical Laboratory.

Discrete auroral arcs frequently bridge the polar cap connecting the morning and evening sectors of the auroral oval along the line of the transpolar (electron) current. Very high-latitude stations that lie wholly within the oval during the earth's diurnal rotation pass under this bridge twice a day, giving morning and evening maxima. Stations at slightly lower latitudes on Spitsbergen lie within the oval in the evening but under, or even south of, the oval in the morning. From such stations the evening, but not the morning, maximum is readily observed. This study is primarily concerned with the orientation of discrete polar cap arcs in the evening skies over Spitsbergen. It shows that the geomagnetic alignment of these arcs is latitude-dependent between geomagnetic colatitudes 6 to 20°N. At the highest latitudes within this range, the arcs are in transpolar alignment, whereas at the lowest latitudes within the polar cap, they are oval-aligned. At intermediate latitudes, the arcs are observed in transitional phases between transpolar and ovalalignment. The solar alignment of discrete polar cap arcs is a function of corrected geomagnetic local time. In the early afternoon, solar alignment is poor but this gradually improves throughout the late afternoon until there is excellent alignment at the time of the evening maximum. Recent satellite studies of plasma convection in the polar ionosphere have helped to explain some of the visual characteristics of discrete polar cap aurora observed from Spitsbergen, particularly the irregular alignment of arcs in the region of the Harang discontinuity.

In July 1971, the Moravian mission will have been working in northern Labrador for two hundred years. Theirs was the first mission to North American Eskimos and, as such, it has considerable historical interest. However it is not the purpose of this paper either to give a summary of the whole period—this can be found elsewhere (Anon, 1871; Davey, 1905; Kleivan, 1966)—or to attempt a general assessment of the mission's work. For good or ill, the mission has made its contribution, and the historian leaves consideration of its legacy to the social scientist (Kleivan, 1966; Ben-Dor, 1966). I shall concentrate here upon the foundation and early years of the mission, and try to explain how it gained its foothold.

Following a review of commercially-viable offshore oil deposits in northern Canada, Alaska and Greenland, the author explores alternative possibilities currently under consideration for transporting the oil to centres where it will be used.

Hazards of pipeline construction, particularly under water, and the problems and dangers associated with giant surface tankers and projected giant submarines are discussed. The author concludes that conventional submarines towing oil-filled plastic drogue tanks offer the safest and most expeditious method of solving the problem. This is the second of two articles (see Polar Record, 21 (133): 369–81 (1983)).

One of the logical reasons for exploration is to collect the maximum of information in a specified time; therefore planning should be based on an appreciation of the pregnable gaps in as many fields of science as possible. Present Antarctic exploration is neglecting the biological sciences and in particular those of an experimental nature. Figures published for the contingents from the British Commonwealth, France and Norway at present in Antarctica include twenty-three physicists, thirteen geologists of different varieties and only two biologists. This neglect probably arises from a too rigid conception that field biology is concerned with classification and with natural history. Antarctica, however, offers great possibilities, and even certain advantages, for much biological work, and in particular its simplicity helps ecological thought and nutritional experimentation.

Radar backscatter in Arctic and sub-Arctic regions is temporally dynamic and reflects changes in sea ice, glacier facies, soil thaw state, vegetation cover, and moisture content. Wind scatterometers on the ERS-1 and ERS-2 satellites have amassed a global archive of C-band radar backscatter data since 1991. This paper derives three high temporal resolution data products from this archive that are designed to facilitate scatterometer research in high-latitude environments. Radar backscatter data have a grid spacing of 25 km and are mapped northwards from 60°N latitude over intervals of one, three, and seven days for the period 1991–2000. Data are corrected to a normalized incident angle of 40°. Animations and full-resolution data products are freely available for scientific use at http://merced.gis.ucla.edu/scatterometer/index.htm.

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 Polar Record, Vol 11, No 75,1963, p 735, I. A. Suyetova made calculations of the area of Antarctica and of its major ice shelves based on published and unpublished material available up to 1961. Suyetova's estimate of the area of the ice shelves, excluding attached islands and ice rises, is 1–38 × 106 km2. In a study of the drainage systems of Antarctica (Giovinetto, 1963) the area of the ice shelves as defined above is estimated at (1·63 ± 0·30) × 106 km2. The latter estimate is based, except for the region of the Filchner Ice Shelf, on the more recent chart of Antarctica compiled by the American Geographical Society (1962; 1:3000000). The difference between the estimates of total ice shelf area cannot be explained entirely by the margin of error; there are some differences between the areas estimated for particular ice shelves which are significant:

A comprehensive visual and photographic record of a wide variety of auroral events was made from Spitsbergen during a prolonged period of clear weather that coincided with a remarkable resurgence in solar activity close to sunspot minimum. Using colour and interference-filter photography, the nature of the different auroral types was established and tentatively correlated with major flare events on the sun. At least three outstanding auroral substorms and three diffuse polar cap glows were generated by four large solar flares in the first half of February 1986. Many discrete polar cap aurorae were also observed in the same period.

In much of the boreal forests, snow covers the ground for half of the year. Since these boreal forests comprise approximately 15% of the land normally covered by snow during the winter and upwards of 40% of the land surface normally snow-covered during the spring and autumn, reliable measures of snow cover and snow mass are required for improved energy-balance and water-balance estimates. In this study, results from snow-depth climatological data (SDC), passive microwave satellite data, and output from general circulation models (GCMs) have been intercompared for the boreal forests of both North America and Eurasia. In Eurasia, during the winter months, snowmass estimates from these data sets correspond rather well; however, in North America, the passive microwave estimates are smaller than the estimates from the climatological data and the modeled data. The underestimation results primarily from the effects of vegetation on the microwave signal. The reason why the underestimation is a bigger problem in North America than in Eurasia is likely due to the use of global microwave algorithms that have not accounted for regional differences in the size of snow grains. The GCMs generally produce too much snow in the spring season. This is a result of the models having moisture amounts that are greater and temperatures that are slightly lower than observed, in the late winter and early spring periods. The models compare more favorably with the SDC in the Eurasian boreal forest than in the forests of North America during the winter season. However, in the spring, the model results for the North America boreal forest are in better agreement with the SDC than are the forests of Eurasia.

Ever since the early explorers realized that the Arctic sea ice is continually moving, breaking and shifting, it has been the subject of scientific curiosity. Beginning with Fridtjof Nansen's crossing of the Arctic Ocean in 1893–96, knowledge has been accumulated about the ocean, the ice, and the atmosphere in the Arctic by means of some 30 drifting ice stations, and numerous aircraft landings and submarine crossings.