As the axis powers were denied access to data from international weather stations under allied control, soon after the outbreak of World War II Germany had to establish her own network of manned and automatic weather stations throughout the north Atlantic. These operations were primarily run by the Kriegsmarine and the Luftwaffe. In Greenland, several manned weather stations were established by the former. The two most successful of those were Holzauge and Bassgeiger in Northeast Greenland, each in operation for almost an entire year in 1942–1943 and 1943–1944 respectively. The allied forces, in return, had established the North-East Greenland Sledge Patrol in 1941, in order to defend the Northeast Greenland coast against German activities. In 2007 and 2008, archaeologists and historians from the National Museum of Denmark investigated the remains of the allied station at Eskimonæs on Clavering Ø (Clavering Island) and the German station Holzauge at Hansa Bugt on Sabine Ø (Sabine Island).

Remote sensing has provided evidence of vegetation changes in Arctic tundra that may be attributable to recent climate warming. These changes are evident from local scales as expanding shrub cover observed in aerial photos, to continental scales as greening trends based on satellite vegetation indices. One challenge in applying conventional two date, satellite change detection in tundra environments is the short growing season observation window, combined with high inter-annual variability in vegetation conditions. We present an alternative approach for investigating tundra vegetation and surface cover changes based on trend analysis of long-term (1985-present) Landsat TM/ETM+ image stacks. The Tasseled Cap brightness, greenness, and wetness indices, representing linear transformations of the optical channels, are analysed for per-pixel trends using robust linear regression. The index trends are then related to changes in fractional shrub and other vegetation covers using a regression tree classifier trained with high resolution land cover. Fractional trends can be summarised by vegetation or ecosystem type to reveal any consistent patterns. Example results are shown for a 3 000 km2 study area in northern Yukon, Canada where index and fractional changes are related to growth of vascular plants and coastal erosion.

Keith Richard Greenaway, who died on 21 May 2010, aged 94, established himself early in his career as the pre-eminent authority in north America on Arctic air navigation. He was only a flight lieutenant, RCAF, with 11 years service when he published his Arctic air navigation (1951), which immediately became the standard textbook in its field. The book deals with all aspects of air navigation, bringing information scattered in various publications together with the author's already very wide practical experience. The heart of the book details the limitations of the magnetic compass in high latitudes and sets out procedures in the reliable Asco-Gyro system of navigation, which Greenaway did so much to develop and which involves the determination of aircraft heading by astro compass and the maintenance of direction by gyro compass, continuously corrected for gyro-drift.

In addition to the visits to Beechey Island referenced in my recent article (Hansen 2010), M'Dougall also describes his visit to Beechey Island (in Resolute with De Bray) from Tuesday 10 August 1852 (mistakenly given as 11 August) to Sunday, 15 August (M'Dougall 1857: 78–87). He gives his version of the inscriptions of the three Franklin expedition headboards. While he follows the mistaken placement order as in Osborn and The Illustrated London News of 4 October 1851 (Osborn 1865: 90; The Illustrated London News 1851b), comparison of the inscriptions with both Kane (Kane 1854: 163) and the photo of the Torrington headboard in Powell (Powell 2006: 330, Fig. 10) now lead me to conclude that M'Dougall's rather than Kane's version of the Franklin headboards inscriptions are probably the most accurate of the contemporary accounts.

Tourism in Antarctica has grown substantially over recent decades and has diversified into different activities and modes of transport. This paper presents a first attempt to explore the implications of this diversification trend for Antarctic tourist experiences, wildlife and onsite management. Evidence from a passenger survey, participatory observations and expert interviews using video elicitation has been collected during, and in the context of, a diving expedition cruise. The data suggests that significant differences can be detected in the way divers and non-divers experience aspects of the trip, most notably regarding guides. The results also indicate that diverse activities generate a broader variance in attitudes and behaviours, which may have repercussions for wildlife, site use and onsite management. Given the diversification trend it is timely and necessary to revisit and consistently enforce site guidelines and visitor guidelines with an eye on multi-activity trips. In addition, further studies on the implications of this trend are needed by means of case studies, surveys looking at a wider range of tourist trips, and monitoring programmes assessing wildlife behaviour and impacts.

The boreal vegetation of the sub-Arctic comprises more than 30% of the Earth's forest area and plays a major role in controlling the global environment. In the 20th century the boreal vegetation of Fennoscandia was significantly changed by heavy industrialisation leaving many forest areas damaged or dying. Due to severe climate conditions of the sub-Arctic such vegetation changes are traceable over long periods of time. This provides an opportunity to study all types of human impact on vegetation in time and to develop methods to monitor geographical and structural changes in the vegetation cover. Here we present the first part of a larger study in which we use the remote sensing technique to investigate the dynamics of the boreal vegetation in Fennoscandia in context of human impact. We have developed a novel method for an automated analysis and mapping of vegetation and of all types of human impact based on a single support-vector-machines classifier (for the whole area). Implemented with free and open source software the method uses Landsat TM and ETM+ band data (for which it automatically performs atmospheric correction) and a number of indices like NDVI, NBR, etc. The accuracy of the 16-class classification has been assessed using field data and literature sources and determined to be 74.1%. The method has been successfully applied to a study area around Monchegorsk, Kola peninsula, Russia, the most industrialised part of northern Europe. We have characterised all major types of human impact on the boreal forest and tundra vegetation performing the change detection analysis in an area of 1750 km2 between 1986 and 2005. The analysis has confirmed industrial atmospheric pollutions as the primary type of human impact here. We have discussed the role of forest fires and uncovered temporal trends in the vegetation cover. We have found that during the 19 years covered by the study more than one third of all coniferous forest in the area was transformed primarily to wetland, deciduous forest and typical tundra vegetation. The success of the method in this area allows us to extend the study to the rest of Fennoscandia and look at large scale changes in the boreal vegetation cover.

This book (Schwarzenbach 2011) has a strange and remarkable history, which explains the fact that it has now been published in 2011, 58 years after the fieldwork on the project that was undertaken in the summer of 1953.

Those readers of Polar Record who are familiar with the narratives of Scott, Shackleton and Mawson during the ‘heroic age’ of Antarctic exploration, will have come across a sledging food called ‘plasmon’. Here, therefore, for their amusement is an outside page of an advertisement for that product, probably of the 1890's or early 1900's (Fig. 1). It measures 12 × 9 inches. Only the front and back pages form the advertisement which indicates on the back page that plasmon is available from all groceries and that a teaspoon a day ‘will prove a great aid to health and strength’. The centre pages carry the words and music of a song entitled ‘Humpty and Dumpty’ said to have been sung by Miss Ellaline Terriss (1871–1971), the well known, and long lived, actress and singer.

William Harvie (‘Tommy’) Thomson, DSC (1922–2012) was born in Airdrie, Lanarkshire, Scotland on 13 September 1922. Following distinguished service as a Fleet Air Arm pilot in World War II, he joined the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey (FIDS) in 1946, serving in 1947–1948 at Base E (Stonington Island) as pilot of the Survey's newly-acquired Auster aircraft.

This paper develops a simple method for the detection of ‘vegetation anomalies’, locations where the amount of vegetation, estimated through the use of the normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI), is significantly lower than expected on the basis of topographic factors alone. The method is developed and tested using satellite imagery from the area around the town of Monchegorsk on the Kola Peninsula, Russia. This area has been subject to heavy levels of airborne industrial pollution for many years and the intended purpose of the method is to allow the extent of pollution damaged vegetation to be estimated with as few operational decisions as possible by the data analyst, thus suiting it for automation and for the analysis of time-series of satellite images. While the work described in this paper is to some extent preliminary, it does establish that spatial variations in the NDVI of undisturbed vegetation can, at least in the study area, be modelled satisfactorily using topographic variables, and that negative departures from this modelled variation are very strongly associated with industrially mediated damage.

The academic study of local and regional history in Sweden took on a quite new form and significance in the 18th century. Humiliating defeats in wars had brought the kingdom's period of greatness to an end and forced the crown to re-evaluate the country's position and image and reconsider the internal questions of economic efficiency and settlement. One aspect in this was more effective economic and political control over the peripheral parts of the realm, which meant that also the distant region of Kemi Lapland, bordering on Russia, became an object of systematic government interest. The practical local documentation of this area took the form of dissertations prepared by students native to the area under the supervision of well known professors, reports sent back by local ministers and newspaper articles. The people responsible for communicating this information may be said to have functioned as ‘mimic men’ in the terminology of H.K. Bhabha. This supervised gathering and publication of local information created the foundation for the nationalist ideology and interest in ordinary people and local cultures that emerged at the end of the century and flourished during the 19th century.

During the explorations of Pourquoi-Pas?, commanded by Jean Baptiste Charcot, in the Southern Ocean in the period 1908–1910, Ensign R.-E. Godfroy collected, between latitudes 64°09'S and 70°05'S, eleven samples of air, according to instructions given by Muntz and Luné (1911) for measuring the concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere. The samples were later analysed in the laboratories of the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers, Paris using basically the same methods as for the samples collected by the French First Polar Year expedition 1882–1883 (Baker 2009). The maximum concentration of CO2 was 255 ppm, the minimum 145 ppm (the sample taken at sea at 69°30'S) and the mean 205 ppm. The average of the concentrations in the samples made by the French first IPY expedition at Bahia Orange was 256ppm and the minimum was 231 ppm.

Each year Polar Record calls upon numerous scholars to assist in the demanding and intensive refereeing and peer-review procedures for manuscripts submitted for publication. These individuals give generously of their time and expertise to help ensure that a high academic quality is maintained in Polar Record. During the preparation of the four issues for 2011, the following individuals participated in the review and refereeing process. Our deep appreciation for their assistance is offered to all.

This note considers some of the WikiLeaks Arctic cables, and their possible implications for how we might understand the framing of the region. What matters is not so much the content of the leaked cables but rather the way in which their release stirred up debate about the underlying behaviour and motivation of interested parties, especially the Arctic Ocean coastal states. Their existence in the public domain usefully highlights the potential role for new knowledge networks and actors in the www era.