Project “Ice Skate” was initiated in 1957 to establish and support the United States drifting research stations in the Arctic Ocean, “Alpha”, and “Bravo” and later the “Alpha” replacement, “Charlie”. The purpose of the project was to provide facilities for research in geophysical phenomena as prescribed in the Arctic Ocean Study Program formulated by the United States National Committee for the International Geophysical Year, and continued under the International Geophysical Co-operation Program.

The ship Veslekari was launched in 1918 from Christian Jensen's shipyard near Kristiania (present-day Oslo), where Roald Amundsen's ship Maud had been built. Although primarily a sealer, she was also used extensively for other expeditions to the Arctic. She participated in several relief expeditions, including one in 1936 to Jan Mayen to evacuate people during a series of earthquakes, and another in 1939 to northeast Greenland to evacuate Count Gaston Micard, who was seriously ill. In 1928 Veslekari participated in the search for Roald Amundsen and his plane in the waters off Bjørnøya. Tryggve Gran, a member of Robert Falcon Scott's last expedition, sailed with her at that time. She was chartered four times as expedition ship for the American Arctic explorer Miss Louise A. Boyd. In the summer of 1940 Veslekari sailed to northeast Greenland to relieve Norwegian hunters and the crew of the Norwegian weather station, but she was impounded by British and Norwegian forces and taken to Scotland on order of the Norwegian government in London. She was chartered by the Ministry of War Transport and was based in Scotland and Iceland. In 1943 she was renamed HMS Bransfield and was prepared for service in the Antarctic. After the war she resumed sealing under Norwegian ownership until in 1961, when she was wrecked in the ice in the sealing ground off Newfoundland.

Like many of his contemporaries, the popular novelist Jules Verne (1828–1905) was deeply influenced by the geographical explorations of the mid 19th century. Of more than 60 novels published from 1855 onward in his series Les voyages extraordinaires, which involved tales of adventure, travel, geographical discovery or scientific or technological innovation, 11 included scenes or themes of polar travel. Verne clearly relied for his material and inspiration on current or recently-published polar expedition narratives of the Victorian era.

If one is sufficiently bold or foolish to ask why the musk-ox Ovibos moschatus was domesticated, even a superficial review of the available evidence suggests that several answers may be given, depending upon the viewpoint from which the question is posed. I have argued elsewhere (Wilkinson, 1972a; 1973) that the domestication of the musk-ox was inevitable if the exploitation of musk-oxen was to continue in the present century. Because of certain biological and behavioural characteristics, musk-oxen can be exploited in only two ways without endangering their survival or exceeding their capacity to regenerate their numbers: they may be hunted as what I have called a critical resource, by which I mean a resource that is not exploited regularly (including seasonally) or intensively, but without which human survival is difficult or impossible incertain areas and periods; alternatively, musk-oxen may be exploited on a sustained basis for a combination of meat, milk, robes, or qiviur through domestication. Archaeological and ethnographic evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that, as a general rule, musk-oxen were hunted as a critical resource before the arrival of Europeans in the Canadian Arctic.

The data used by Dr Frederick A. Cook in support of his claim to have reached the North Pole on 21 April 1908 are reinterpreted to support a hypothesis that Cook did not reach the Pole, that his journey towards the Pole lasted only one week, and thathe subsequently discovered and visited Meighen Island. This reconstruction explains how Dr Cook could have made observations of ice conditions and drift, and of an ice island, without having travelled far out on the Arctic Ocean. A possible reason for his failure to announce discovery of Meighen Island is also offered.

The Government of Canada began supplying housing for some of its Eskimo people in the Northwest Territories in 1956. At this date the majority of Eskimos still followed their traditional nomadic way of life and lived in igloos or snow houses during winter, and in skin or canvas tents during summer. Since 1956, the tendency of Eskimo families to settle in the vicinity of trading posts, church missions, and newly established federal schools has increased, and the problem of providing permanent accommodation for them has been aggravated. At first the new townsmen improvised shelters from a combination of tents, packing cases, and scraps of metal, tar paper and lumber. When these inadequate dwellings were used as permanent residences, grave social and public health problems resulted from overcrowding.

The Royal Research Ship Discovery II left London for her second commission in Antarctic waters on October 3, 1931 and returned on May 5, 1933. A note on her work in the Falkland sector of the Antarctic in the summer season of 1931–32 appeared in The Polar Record, No. 4, and a short account of her cruises in the winter of 1932 was published in The Polar Record, No. 5. The whole commission is summarised in this article.

The original Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, passed in 1971, gave Alaska Native corporations fee simple title to 18 million hectares of Alaskan land. Within a few years of its passage, however, Alaska Natives grew concerned that this land would be lost through mismanagement of the corporations or forced into development by property taxation. Because large numbers of Alaska Natives depend upon subsistence hunting and fishing, the loss of the land, or its use for activities incompatible with subsistence, could have been devastating. Amendments of 1987 (PL 100–241) protect Native corporation land by placing all undeveloped land in a land bank and allowing for the formation of ‘Settlement Trusts“. More importantly, Congress recognized that the Native subsistence economy and culture are significant factors in the management of Native lands.

Fur seals were exterminated from Macquarie Island about 20 years after discovery of the island in 1810. Their specific identity is unknown. Few fur seals were reported at the island until it was occupied by the Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions in 1948. Fur seal numbers are now increasing. An archaeological excavation at a sealers' quarters at Sandy Bay in 1988 revealed the fragmented skull of a young Antarctic fur seal Arctocephalus gazella 1.1 m below the surface in a layer dated in the 1870s and 1880s. This period coincides with the recovery of fur seal populations in the South Atlantic Ocean following earlier harvesting. Elsewhere it has been argued that the Antarctic fur seal is unlikely to have been the original fur seal at Macquarie Island because few individuals of that species are ashore in winter, which is the season when the island was discovered and fur-seal harvesting began. It is concluded that the Sandy Bay skull is from a vagrant animal.