The archipelago of the lies Kerguelen is a group of volcanic islands in the Indian Ocean roughly equidistant from the Malagasy Republic, Australia and Antarctica. It is formed of around 300 islands amounting to some 7 000 km. The main island alone, usually called “Grande Terre”, covers nearly 6 000 km. Descriptions of the archipelago have been given by Paulian (1953) and Aubert de la Rue (1954). Several attempts have been made to acclimatize animals to these islands. Being entirely without terrestrial mammals they have, during recent centuries, attracted the attention of sealers and whalers, anxious to maintain a supply of fresh meat near their sealing and whaling grounds. At the beginning of this century, various attempts at economic exploitation led to the introduction of some domestic species. More recently, several similar attempts have again been made but these have sprung more from a desire to populate these empty spaces than from any systematic programme of acclimatization. The more recent introductions have extended even to the islands’ streams.

For several years. Geophysical Survey Systems, Inc has been using an impulse radar system as a shallow subsurface exploration tool for engineering applications. Recently this system has been applied to the measurement of ice thicknesses both on sea-water and fresh-water ice. In the course of a feasibility study performed in December 1972, thebasic operating parameters and limitations of the tool when operated on ice were determined. Following the feasibility study, operational surveys were performed totalling approximately 11 crew-months and covering in excess of 1 500 km of survey route at several locations in the Canadian Arctic. The technique is known as Electromagnetic Subsurface Profiling (ESP), and it can be considered the electromagnetic equivalent of the single-trace acoustic profiling methods used for marine subbottom profiling. In practice, ice-thickness profiling is done by towing a sled-mounted antenna behind a tracked vehicle containing the impulse system (Fig 1). Real-time profile data are displayed graphically on a strip-chart recorder. The data may also be recorded on magnetic tape for later processing and playback.

Greenland, the world's largest island, stretches some 2 700 km from north to south and about 1 050 km from east to west. It has a total area of 2175 km2, five-sixths of which is covered by an ice sheet. About 40 000 Greenlanders and 7 000 Danes inhabit a coastal ice-free area of about 150 000 km2, most of which is in south-west Greenland. Since 1953, Greenland has been an integral part of the Kingdom of Denmark and is represented by two elected members of the Danish Parliament (Folketing), and it has its own local government. The country is administered from Denmark by the Ministry of Greenland (Ministeriet for Grønland) and, in Greenland, the Governor (Landshøvdingen) is the chief representative of the State.

In the last few years there has been much interest in various physiological processes known to take place within toothed whales, dolphins, and porpoises (odontocetes). Such processes as respiration, audio-communication, echolocation, and buoyancy control have all been studied (Evans, 1967; Caldwell and Caldwell, 1968; Matthews, 1968; Poulter, 1968; Norris, 1968; 1969; Norris and Evans, 1967; Clarke, 1970). The odontocetes have been found to possess a large, fat-rich body called a “melon” in their foreheads, directly in front of the skull. It has been suggested that this melon is an acoustical transducer for transmitting and possibly focusing ultrasonic sound waves into the surrounding water for the purpose of echolocation (Norris, 1968; 1969; Norris and Evans, 1967). Certainly all odontocetes are known to produce orientated beams of sound, generated, it is thought, at the extermities of the animal's nasal plug (Evans and others, 1964; Norris, 1964).

Due to its length the Guide to current published meteorological data has been split into two parts. The first part of the Guide was published in Polar Record, Vol 17, No 110, 1975, and included data for Alaska, northern Canada and Greenland. This second part contains data for northern Finland. Iceland, northern Norway, northern Sweden, and northern and eastern USSR. For the convenience of the reader the list of symbols has been repeated.

In October 1834, The Suffolk Chronicle announced that “Mr. Webster of the Chanticleer is now practising surgery in this town” Earlier that year, he had achieved a little fame by publishing Narrative of a voyage to the Southern Atlantic Ocean in the years 1828, 29, 30, performed in H.M. Sloop Chanticleer, . . . from the private journal of W. H. B. Webster, surgeon of the sloop (London, Richard Bentley, 1834). This two-volume work sold fairly widely, and the Ipswich Public Library bought a copy at the time.

A great amount of meteorological data, in both numerical and map form, is available to the researcher interested in the poleward portions of the Northern Hemisphere. Unfortunately, few libraries maintain a current collection of meteorological data journals of foreign areas, although several journals published in the United States include surface and upper level charts for the Northern Hemisphere, and station data on a world-wide basis. In order to provide assistance in determining the availability of point and spatial meteorological data, I have compiled a bibliography of current serial publications which contains Information on the specific meteorological parameters to be found within the latest issue of the journal that I was able to examine. Following the annotated bibliography there is a listing of all weather, climatological and precipitation stations that have data within the most recently published journals. Each list gives the station name, location, height and journals in which its data are published. Omitted from this Guide are stations with less than one year of record, summer-only stations and those not included in the most recent issue of any journal (1972 to 1975) because they have started observations too recently or have ceased operation. All stations are also located on maps.

After three years' delay, work started early in 1974 on the construction of the trans-Alaska pipeline from Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic coast of Alaska 1 270 km to Valdez on the Gulf of Alaska (Ronhovde. 1974). Within three years, the line should be delivering 1.2 million barrels per day, a volume that will be increased eventually to a daily flow of 2 million barrels. Gas production on the North Slope of Alaska will probably be exported through Canada to the United States through a 4 184-km pipeline that will cost an estimated $5.7 billion and, if built, will be one of the largest construction projects ever undertaken; the system will also carry Canadian Arctic gas to southern markets. The size of these projects is in themselves impressive, and they have been spawned and are being launched in an atmosphere of controversy and confusion that, in its different way, is equally impressive.

Arctic sea ice is currently receiving increasing attention, both in relation to technological problems associated with resources development and shipping (Walker and Penney, 1973), and to basic research questions. The polar pack ice in the Beaufort Sea, for example, is the focus of the Arctic Ice Dynamics Joint Experiment (AIDJEX) (Untersteiner, 1974), while an analysis of physical links between the characteristics of polar surfaces and climate is to be the crux of the United States contribution to the Polar Experiment (POLEX) (Weller and Bierly, 1973; National Academy of Sciences, 1974). A general discussion of sea ice, with emphasis on pack ice, has been presented recently by Wittman and Burkhart (1973), but another aspect of the sea ice regime deserving separate attention, particularly in the light of Arctic offshore oil developments, is the landfast or fast ice, ie that part of the sea ice which remains attached to the shore (see “Sea ice terminology”). This paper attempts to provide a broad picture of fast ice characteristics in the context of our field experience in the eastern Canadian Arctic.

The general large-scale circulation of the global atmosphere has its basic driving mechanism in the equator-poleward temperature gradients in both hemispheres. It has become increasingly obvious over the last few decades that to understand and predict the behaviour of the atmosphere at any point, it is essential to understand the behaviour of the total global fluid system. The Global Atmospheric Research Project (GARP) is an outcome of this recognition. Studies of the heat sinks (the polar regions) are therefore just as important as studies of the heat source (the equatorial regions) to understand the meteorology of the planet. Interest in polar meteorology has undergone many cyclic fluctuations, peaking during the various international polar years and, more recently, during the International Geophysical Year, 1957–58. At the present, the focus of GARP's first objective (improved extended weather forecasts) is on the tropical heat source, where convection and cloud formation and dissipation are still relatively little understood processes. However, the second GARP objective (better understanding of the physical basis of climate) requires more attention to be devoted to the cryosphere, its long-term interaction with oceans and atmosphere, and its role as an indicator of climatic change. The idea of a polar experiment (POLEX) was initially introduced by Treshnikov and others (1968) and by Borisenkov and Treshnikov (1971). A summary of the early history of POLEX was recently given by Weller and Bierly (1973). The two closely related objectives of POLEX that most directly pertain to GARP may be restated in their simplest terms as (1) a better understanding of energy transfer processes and the heat budgets of the polar regions for the purpose of parameterizing them properly in general circulation models and climate models, and (2) provision of adequate data from the polar regions during the First GARP Global Experiment (FGGE) in 1978.