This paper addresses the transformation that has occurred in livelihoods in the Nordic Arctic, showing how it affects gender equality among the region's older people. The region's population includes the Sámi, an indigenous people, who have traditionally relied for their livelihood on activities such as reindeer herding, making handicrafts, farming, fishing, hunting, trapping and gathering. In recent years these have faced enormous challenges because of the rapid transformation of the region in the wake of climate change and globalisation. Overall, these and other processes have precipitated socio-economic, cultural, environmental and infrastructural changes that are transforming the local economies and severely impacting older people in particular. The main research question examined in this article is whether gender inequality has arisen among older people because of the ongoing transformation of livelihoods. To this end, the paper provides an empirical analysis based on experiences gathered from field studies conducted by the author in Finnish and Swedish Lapland. The research also presents the experiences of older persons in light of the standard set by General Recommendation 27 of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, which oversees the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. The Recommendation sets out the right of older women to equality and non-discrimination. The findings of the present research contribute to filling a gap in the literature on the topic.

This paper compares four maps produced by the Canadian government and Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the indigenous peoples’ organisation representing Inuit living in the four recognised Inuit regions (Inuit Nunangat) of Canada. Our analysis is based on publicly available maps, documents, and records and extends the rich existing literature examining the history of definitions of the Canadian north. Distinctly, our research aims to understand the different ways in which the Arctic has been articulated as a geographic, political, and social region during the Harper government (2006–2015) and the effects these articulations have had on northern policy and people. We find that the federal government maintained a flexible definition of the Canadian Arctic as a region when in pursuit of its own policy objectives. However, when it comes to incorporating areas outside the boundaries of Canada's three federal territories, particularly communities along their southern fringes, those boundaries are inflexible. The people who live in these areas, which the state considers to be outside the Canadian Arctic, are marginalised within Arctic public policy in terms of access to federal funds, determination of land use, and a sense of social belonging to the Canadian Arctic. Our goal in this paper is to demonstrate that national-level disputes over what constitutes ‘the Arctic’ can significantly impact the day-to-day lives of people who live within and just outside the region, however it is conceived.

In 1968, the British/Swedish architect Ralph Erskine published an article ‘Architecture and town planning in the north’ in this journal, in which he called for a particular Arctic approach to the design of buildings and cities that is distinct from mainstream architecture due to conditions such as harsh climate, resident indigenous or sparse population and remoteness. One hundred years after his birth (in 1914), Erskine is still considered the authoritative ‘Arctic architect’, and his approach is paradigmatic among many architects dealing with the built environment in the Arctic, sub-Arctic and northern regions.

However, a study of the literature on architectural practice and the built environment in the north reveals a number of varying conceptions of Arctic architecture. These different perspectives are social in nature and construct the architectural technologies, the natural environment and society in different configurations. This article finds that architectural discourses and readings of the Arctic change under the influence of social, cultural, political and architectural paradigms. The perspectives identified in the article are seen to be critical supplements to Erskine's utopian approach to developing new sustainable forms of urbanism and architecture in the Arctic. They also reveal that new conceptions do not necessarily replace previous ones but often overlap and place earlier ideas into fresh concepts and that certain conceptions appear to perpetuate over the decades, such as the Arctic as an ‘empty space’. The thinking on Arctic futures is, in many ways, trapped in certain modernist and utopian modes, and this article contributes to widening the range of possible relationships between people and the Arctic environment, using architecture as an aperture.

The preambles of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty and the 1991 Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic state that Antarctica is to be managed in the interest of all mankind. However, key phrases such as ‘interest of all mankind’ and ‘wilderness and aesthetic values’ are subject to interpretation. The objective of this study is to gain a better understanding of public perceptions of the Antarctic wilderness, proceeding from the assumption that public views should be incorporated into the consultative parties’ decision making process. The study expands on previous research by exploring whether perceptions of the Antarctic environment varied between students at two comparably sized public universities in Spain and the United States. Four hundred undergraduate students were asked about their values, beliefs and attitudes with respect to environmental management practices in Antarctica. After controlling for course type, responses showed little variation based on nationality. A large proportion of students valued Antarctica as a science laboratory for the benefit of mankind, as one of the world's last great wildernesses, and an important component of the climate system. Students did not support an increase in the number of people going to Antarctica, and favoured limitations on infrastructure development.

In 2013, partial skeletal remains from three members of the 1845 John Franklin expedition were recovered from an archaeological site at Erebus Bay, King William Island, Nunavut. The remains included three crania, two of which were sufficiently intact to allow craniofacial reconstructions. Identifications are not proposed for either reconstruction; however, tentative identifications are being explored through DNA analyses currently underway that include samples obtained from both crania.

Medical factors including tuberculosis, scurvy, lead poisoning and botulism have been proposed to explain the high death rate prior to desertion of the ships on Sir John Franklin's expedition of 1845–1848 but their role remains unclear because the surgeons’ Sick books which recorded illness on board have eluded discovery. In their absence, this study examines the Sick books of Royal Naval search squadrons sent in search of Franklin, and which encountered similar conditions to his ships, to consider whether their morbidity and mortality might reflect that of the missing expedition. The Sick books of HMS Assistance, Enterprise, Intrepid, Investigator, Pioneer and Resolute yielded 1,480 cases that were coded for statistical analysis. On the basis of the squadrons’ patterns of illness it was concluded that Franklin's crews would have suffered common respiratory and gastro-intestinal disorders, injuries and exposure and that deaths might have occurred from respiratory, cardiovascular and tubercular conditions. Scurvy occurred commonly and it was shown that the method of preparing ‘antiscorbutic’ lemon juice for the search squadrons and Franklin's ships would have reduced its capacity to prevent the disease but there were no grounds to conclude that scurvy was significant at the time of deserting the ships. There was no clear evidence of lead poisoning despite the relatively high level of lead exposure that was inevitable on ships at that time. There was no significant difference between the deaths of non-officer ranks on Franklin's ships and several of the search ships. The greater number of deaths of Franklin's officers was proposed to be more probably a result of non-medical factors such as accidents and injuries sustained while hunting and during exploration.

28 individual poems, notes, or drawings found and photographed under the bunks at Borchgrevink's hut at Cape Adare, Antarctica during two short visits on 1 February and 19 February 2015, are catalogued, translated and in many cases a source is identified. It has been possible to read and translate 24 of 28 markings. The relevance of a number of quotations, which express unhappiness with the leadership of the expedition and the emotional reaction of expedition members, are examined and placed in the context of the first over-wintering. Further targeted investigation, requiring specific permission, is suggested.

Contamination of snow cover has been investigated in the Longyearbyen (78°13 N, 15°38 E) and Barentsburg (78°3 N, 14°12 E) areas, which are situated in the southwest part of Spitsbergen (Svalbard archipelago). Snow cover was sampled in two winter seasons, 2012–2013 and 2013–2014, at 54 locations within potentially contaminated areas. Sampling incorporated the whole snow mass and was combined with morphological observations as well as thickness and density measurements. Meltwater and suspended solids were further analysed for a wide range of contaminants including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and macro-ions. Results were contrasted with previous studies measuring the release of contaminants from snow to soil cover. It was shown in keeping with earlier studies that PAH contributions are associated with airborne particulate matter. The results, in contrast to earlier studies further demonstrated that the high concentrations of contaminants in both settlements are attributed to local sources due to combustion and industrial activity.

At least four littoral countries have Arctic strategies that address energy issues. However, US, Canada, Russia and Norway strategies up to 2020 and beyond, reveal different interests in exploring Arctic resources. While Arctic oil and gas are of strategic importance to Russia and to Norway, Canada and the US seem content with continuing their current extraction predominantly south of the Arctic Circle. Despite the different approaches, the outcomes seem strangely similar. Indeed, despite the hype concerning the Arctic in the last decade, and for very diverse reasons, it is unlikely that any of these four countries will increase hydrocarbon production in the Arctic during the period under analysis. This was true even before the recent drop in oil prices. For all its potential, it is unclear what lies ahead for the region.

Reindeer racing is a sport that is unique to the Scandinavian and Russian Arctic countries. The paper is based on fieldwork carried out in Finnish Lapland in which the process of training race reindeer and the reindeer race competition is examined. It gives some insight into the cultural practices that are used by Finnish reindeer herders in Lapland to train reindeer to race and the relationship that is nurtured between the race reindeer and the trainer. This paper focuses primarily on two key ethnographic interviews from the field and uses additional fieldwork data to support the points of discussion. It gives insight into the concept of ownership and what is considered to be a ‘good’ race reindeer. The reindeer trainer's understanding of the semi-domesticated reindeer challenges the concept of what it means to be ‘wild.’ This is taken into consideration in an examination of the process of the further domestication and training of the reindeer to race. The research explored the nature of the racing environment, the uniqueness of the reindeer racing event and aspects that makes it traditional and appealing for both international tourists and spectators from the north.

Cryoconite holes have ecological and biotechnological importance. This article presents results on culturable cryophilic yeasts and filamentous fungi isolated from cryoconite holes at Austre and Vestre Brøggerbreen glaciers, Svalbard. Based on DNA sequence data, these were identified as Rhodotorula sp., Thelebolus sp., and Articulospora tetracladia. Amongst these, Articulospora tetracladia (88.7–89.4% gene similarity with 5.8S rDNA) is a novel species, yet to be described. Filamentous fungus Articulospora sp. Cry-FB1 and Cry-FB2, expressed high amylase, cellulase, lipase and protease activities while yeast Rhodotorula sp. Cry-FB3 showed high amylase and cellulase activity. Thelebolus sp. Cry-YB 240 and Cry-YB 241 showed protease and urease activities. The effects of temperature, and salt on the growth of the cultures were studied. Optimum temperature of growth was on 10ºC at pH 7.0. Filamentous fungi and yeast in the cryoconite holes possibly drive the process of organic macromolecule degradation through cold-adapted enzyme secretion, thereby assisting in nutrient cycling in these supraglacial environments. Further, these cryophilic fungi, due to their enzyme producing ability, may provide an opportunity for biotechnological research in the Arctic.

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.

This paper investigates historical quarry abandonment in Spitsbergen, Svalbard. A short-lived British marble quarry in Kongsfjorden lay deserted after 1920. We ask why this attempt at the large-scale development of Arctic marble was unproductive; whether there are structural features that affected the known historical trenches and boreholes; and whether the reason for abandonment was primarily geological. During interdisciplinary fieldwork rooted in industrial archaeology and structural geology, we employed medium-resolution ground penetration radar (GPR) to discern subsurface disturbances near the workings. Seven survey grids gave rise to both areas of fracturing and folding as well as areas of sound marble. Using complementary historical documents, we are able to dispel the myths that permafrost or shattered surface rock affected workability and profitability. Although structural disturbances were present, bedrock geology was, in fact, less important than the proportion of waste rock to marketable product. Whether a product was marketable depended on a multitude of other factors. This paper moves away from oversimplified reasoning in mining history and promotes the bridging of geological and historical scales in order to understand the full suite of local and global driving forces in the historical process.

We provide a comprehensive list of microorganisms (algae, Archaea, bacteria, cyanobacteria, fungi, and Protista) inhabiting cryoconite holes on glaciers throughout the world, giving an updated taxonomy accompanied by geographic coordinates and localities. The list consists of 370 taxa reported from cryoconite holes (mostly from Arctic and Antarctic regions and European Alps). However, most of the taxa were not identified to the species level. Until now only 39 identified species or subspecies of bacteria and Archaea, 11 fungi, 17 cyanobacteria, 62 algae, and 13 Protista are known from cryoconite holes, which are only about 38% of total number of taxa reported from these ephemeral environments. Almost 62% of the taxa were marked as cf. (confer) or were identified only to the genera or even to the higher taxonomic units (such as families or orders). This wide and detailed review assists other scientists to identify the gaps in our knowledge about cryobionts and indicates directions for further zoogeographical and taxonomical studies in this unique freshwater habitat.

The politics, economies, and ecology of the Arctic region are experiencing fundamental transformation driven largely by human-caused environmental change. Drawing on the work of Robert Cox, this article presents a critical account of environmental security that allows security issues in the Arctic to be reconceptualised. It outlines the environmental changes transforming the Arctic, and theorises the Arctic as a regional environmental security complex in which conditions of security for state and non-state referent objects are predicated on a particular ecological context. It then surveys state- and human security issues in the Arctic, and argues that environmental change has destabilised the ecological base on which the contemporary Arctic as a cooperative region supportive of human activity has been built. The article concludes by outlining alternative ways of conceiving of Arctic security that are more compatible with maintaining the region's ecological base, and suggests that dominant approaches to Arctic security are pathological because they remain premised on the control, extraction and consumption of hydrocarbon resources. It argues that, in the context of the geological Anthropocene, security cannot be sustainable if it fails to address the relationship between human wellbeing and human-caused environmental change, or informs practices that further contribute to environmental change.

The Arctic and nearby remote areas are attracting more attention than ever before, because of their abundance of physical natural resources as well their wilderness environments which have become a major attraction for tourists. But use of land for tourism practices can lead to conflicts with other industries that utilise natural resources. Tourism in Iceland has grown rapidly in recent decades and nature and the wilderness is the main attraction. As well as being an important resource for the tourism industry, wilderness and natural areas are also very valuable for hydro–electric and geothermal power production. During the latter half of the last century several glacier–fed rivers in the highlands were dammed and hydropower plants built. Now there are plans for further exploitation of the natural resources which creates challenges and conflicts as many of the proposed power plants are located in natural areas, some of which are defined as wilderness. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the development of tourism in the Icelandic highlands and power production development and the challenges created by the changing idea of natural resources. It discusses a governmental project which is intended to solve the challenging conflicts about the use of natural areas. The project exposed the fact that the energy resources in the country are a far more limited resource than has previously been assumed. The power production industry now has to share the limited natural resources with the tourism industry. Thereby the ideas about natural resources and their utilisation are being re–defined by Icelandic society, depending on technology, global influences and other social trends.

‘Speaking’ and ‘belonging’ have a particular salience as indices of intimacy in a remote corner of northwest Greenland where connectedness is constantly reinforced through a distinct commonality of expression and certain social practices, such as very frequent visiting of one another, story-telling, recycling of names and a shared monistic philosophy. The Inugguit define themselves by a repertoire of communicative and behavioural strategies which are used to ensure that one is accepted in a supportive kin group: the perennial social and personal imperative for each member of the group. This article shows how despite social and climatic upheaval, these practices remain, but that the hunters’ ‘symbiotic’ relationship with nature is eroding as the loss of sea ice means they can no longer live like the animals they hunt.

Before Shackleton arrived at South Georgia aboard Endurance on 5 November 1914 he was aware that the vessel might meet bad pack-ice in the Weddell Sea. This had been forecast on the basis of climate analysis by Robert Mossman, the meteorologist on the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition (1902–1904), who was currently working at the Argentine Meteorological Office. Mossman was interested in teleconnections linking meteorological and oceanic conditions in widely separated places and had studied the links between the Weddell Sea and South America. Mossman's Antarctic data were mainly records from the Orcadas station in the South Orkneys which had operated continuously from 1903. He found a correlation between extensive pack-ice in the Weddell Sea and plentiful rain in a belt across South America that included Buenos Aires. The experiences of Endurance supported this. Modern studies of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) broadly confirm Mossman's conclusions.

An important component of northern research in Canada has been a strong emphasis on local participation. However, the policy and permit landscape for community participation therein is heterogeneous and presents specific challenges in promoting effective partnerships between researchers and local participants. We conducted a survey of northern research stakeholders across Canada in order better to understand the benefits and challenges associated with research partnerships with a view to informing northern research policy and practice. We found that local engagement at the proposal and research design phases, the hiring of community researchers and engagement of local persons at the results dissemination phase were important factors affecting success. Respondents also indicated a lack of social capital (trust and reciprocity) between researchers and communities as placing a negative impact on science partnerships. Overall, researchers were perceived to benefit more from research partnerships than their community counterparts. Partnerships in northern research will possibly require further decentralisation of power to achieve the policy objectives of local community participation. This could be achieved, in part, by allowing non-academic principal investigators to receive funding, or by involving communities in research priority-setting, proposal review and funding allocation processes.

The existence of an icy continent around the South Pole is known to everybody today. But it is common to ascribe this kind of modern knowledge to navigators sailing in southern polar waters in the 19th century. A good illustration of this is the Russian Antarctic expedition (1819–1821) under the conduct of Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen (Russian version Faddej Faddeevich Bellinsgauzen), the reception of which in Russian society of the 19th and 20th centuries is analysed in this article. During the cold war, beginning at the end of the 1940s, the question of who discovered Antarctica turned from being a scientific problem into a subject of political struggle between the United States of America, Great Britain and the Soviet Union. This article provides an analysis of the Russian discovery in the area, while at the same time, attempting to give an answer to the main question of the history of Antarctic exploration which is: is it well-justified to establish the first discoverer of Antarctica? All the dates in the text are according to the Gregorian calendar.