The Distant Early Warning System (DEWLine) is a network of radar and communications stations stretching for some 3600 miles along the 69th parallel from Cape Lisburne, Alaska, to Cape Dyer, Baffin Island, and continuing across Davis Strait and the Greenland ice sheet to the east coast of Greenland. Thence it maintains communication with the North Atlantic Radio System from Keflavfk, Iceland, to Fylingdales Moor, England. The DEWDrop system, a tropospheric scatter communications system links Cape Dyer with the Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile Station at Thule, Greenland and another connects Thule with the DEWLine station FOX, on Foxe Basin. DEWLine stations are supervised and controlled by the US Air Force, by agreement with the Canadian and Danish Governments.

McMurdo Sound is well known as an area comparatively free from fast ice during the middle and late summer. Although closed to its discoverer in February 1841 by contrary winds, pack ice and new ice (Ross, 1847), the sound provided easy access to high latitudes in January and February on at least ten occasions between 1902 and 1916. Since 1955, icebreakers have assisted shipping movements in November and December, and possibly helped in dispersing the winter fast ice by cutting wide channels from Cape Bird southward. However, northerly swells and south-easterly gales are sufficient in most years to disperse fast ice from the southern end of the sound by mid or late February (Heine, 1963).

The cause of the phenomenally high winds recorded by Sir Douglas Mawson's party at Cape Denison during the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, 1911–14 (Mawson, 1939), and by the French expedition to Port Martin in 1950–51 (Boujon, 1954) has never been satisfactorily explained. As indicated in the Table, the annual mean wind recorded at those stations, 71·1 and 64·6 km per h respectively, is about 70 per cent greater than recorded elsewhere around the coast at stations fully exposed to katabatic flow, notably Mirny and Mawson. Admittedly, the total number of coastal stations is small, considering the length of the Antarctic coastline, and one cannot exclude the possibility that similar very strong winds prevail in other places. Nevertheless, the figures for Cape Denison and Port Martin are notable, if not unique, and the question arises why this should occur on the coast of Terre Adélie.

Hovercraft, or air-cushion vehicles, have been proposed several times as a means of polar transport (Mellor, 1963; Fuchs, 1964, 1966; Law, 1965; Cooper, 1965). They ride on a cushion of low pressure air which eliminates friction between the craft and the ground surface, the air being contained by flexible skirts and peripheral jets to give a substantial obstacle clearance. Their low bearing pressure (of the order of 0·01 kg/cm2) makes them potentially suitable for over-snow use. They can travel equally well over ice, snow, and water and thus can give year-round service on Arctic rivers and seas. There is no need for costly facilities such as docks or airstrips at terminals. Finally, the hard structure clearance provided by the flexible skirts should enable the vehicle to cross areas of rough sea ice or pressure ridges without a route being prepared.

The Second Conference of the Arctic Co-operatives was held at Poyungnituk, 19-28 April 1966. The first conference, held three years earlier at Frobisher Bay, had asked the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, which is sponsoring the co-operative development programme in the Canadian north, for assistance in establishing a strong central co-operative marketing agency to develop new markets for the increasing volume of crafts, and to exercise quality control. The Department agreed to discuss this proposal with the Co-operative Union of Canada and the Conseil Canadien de la Cooperation and to prepare a paper outlining its findings in detail. The delegates were to recommend to their co-operatives that they should consider the idea of a central marketing agency.

This report is intended to supplement the more general reports on the activities of the United States in the Antarctic which have appeared in the Polar Record, Vol 12, No 79, 1965, p 439–52 and earlier issues, and in BioScience, Vol 15, No 4, 1965.

During the 1959 activities of the International Glaciological Expedition to Greenland, tellurometer measurements of the geodetic traverse over the ice sheet were found to contain systematic errors of the order of 1 part in 105 in distance measurement, and there was a big loss in instrument range. The origin of these difficulties may lie in the large temperature gradient in the air close to the snow surface, or in the scattering of the signal from the rough surface, or in the propagation characteristics in the dielectric boundary layer between snow and air (Nottarp, 1962). We are concerned here with the practical solution to the difficulty—the use of a high antenna mounting—and with other modifications made to the instruments for use on the Ross Ice Shelf Survey, 1962–63.

The Lambert Glacier system, one of the largest in Antarctica, drains from Princess Elizabeth Land into Prydz Bay, terminating in the Amery Ice Shelf, in about long 70° to 75° E.