Of all the high latitude theatres of naval operations in World War II. the Kara Sea theatre represents one of the most interesting, yet one of the least known. Hostilities in the Kara Sea were based on the belief held by German Naval Command that the Northern Sea Route was being utilized for the movement of Lend-Lease materials from the Pacific coasts of Canada and the USA to the Russian front (Armstrong 1953:823, 1955:141; Huan 1958:156; Mineyev 1964:39). German attempts to disrupt these alleged movements were limited almost entirely to naval operations; the Luftwaffe played little part, since even the south-western approaches to the Kara Sea were out of reach of aircraft based in northern Norway (Huan 1958:156). Most of the activity involved U-boat attacks on shipping and on coastal sites, but on one occasion a German surface vessel, the heavy cruiser Admiral Scheer was involved.

Since Greene and Greene (1963) published their check list of the sub-Antarctic and Antarctic vascular flora, a number of works have appeared which have added new taxa for the region and new records for many of the islands. Some nomenclatural changes have also become necessary following taxonomic revisions so the present check list, which adopts a style and layout similar to that used by Greene and Greene (1963), takes the opportunity to incorporate all of these emendations. Although this paper refers to all taxa noted by Greene and Greene (1963), not all of the sources cited by those authors have been repeated.

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.

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.

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.