In 1999 the United Nations, acting in accordance with the 1996 resolution A51/56, discussed the ‘Question of Antarctica’ again. The UN, having taken up the topic on an annual basis in 1983, is currently placing it upon the First Committee's agenda every three years. The next reference will be in 2002. In 1999 the UN First Committee discussions, guided by a report produced by the UN Secretary-General (UNSG) updating members on recent Antarctic developments, indicated that disagreements still remain about the management of Antarctica. Meanwhile, members adopted another consensus resolution, A54/45, which largely replicated the wording of its 1996 predecessor, most notably in requesting the UNSG to produce another report to guide the next UN discussion scheduled for 2002. Earlier in 1999, the Lima Declaration, adopted by the Antarctic Treaty Parties in May, highlighted the view that the ATS, although linking up increasingly with UN organisations like the United Nations Environment Program, continues to offer the way forward for Antarctica in the twenty-first century.

A small collection of samples from terrestrial and fresh-water habitats on Deception Island in the Maritime Antarctic South Shetland archipelago yielded 14 invertebrate taxa, including four species, which are new to the island. The database of the total Deception fauna contains 57 invertebrate taxa. These, like the flora, show evidence of posteruption colonisation by Antarctic and South American immigrant species, and historic human impact. This baseline inventory allows future monitoring of natural and anthropogenic changes to invertebrate fauna of Deception Island.

Following his return from participating in Benjamin Leigh Smith's expedition that wintered at Cape Flora, Northbrook Island, Franz Josef Land, in 1881–82, William Robertson, the chief engineer on the barque Eira, wrote a brief account of the expedition. Robertson's manuscript emphasises the hunting of walrus prior to reaching Franz Josef Land, the sinking of the ship, the enforced wintering, and the successful retreat of the party by open boat to Novaya Zemlya. The original of the manuscript reproduced here, which is one of only a few first-person accounts known to exist, is held by Robertson's descendants. It has not previously been published.

On 24 December 1819 landing parties from each of Thaddeus Bellingshausen's ships, Vostok and Mirnyy, went ashore on Zavodovski Island, the most northerly of the South Sandwich group. Bellingshausen's second-hand account of these landings has long been available in English. This article presents (in translation) first-hand accounts of these landings by Professor Ivan Mikhaylovich Simonov, the expedition astronomer (from Vostok), and by Midshipman Pavel M. Novosil'skiy (from Mirnyy). Both writers comment on the vast numbers of macaroni and chinstrap penguins nesting on the island; these are still the two dominant penguin species there.

This paper presents new census data and population estimates for penguins, blue-eyed shags, and southern giant petrels from 26 sites in the Antarctic Peninsula, collected by the Antarctic Site Inventory from 1994 to 2000. For nine sites, population data or estimates are published for the first time. The newly discovered gentoo penguin population of 215 nests at Herofna Island (63°24'S, 54°36'W) represents the easternmost location where this species has been found breeding in the Peninsula. All three pygoscelid penguins — gentoo, Adelie, and chinstrap — were found breeding at Gourdin Island (63° 12'S, 57° 18'W), the fourth known site where these species nest contiguously in the Peninsula. During the period, significant declines in nesting populations of blue-eyed shag were documented at three northwestern Peninsula locations.

The results are presented of the first winter ice navigation demonstration, using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images from the Canadian satellite RADARSAT, onboard the nuclear icebreaker Sovetskiy Soyuz in the Kara Sea region in April–May 1998. While ERS SAR data only could cover part of the sea ice in this large area, the demonstration showed that RADARSAT ScanSAR images with 100 m pixel size could be used to map all relevant ice areas with a few 500 × 500 km scenes. SAR images transferred onboard icebreakers in near real time offer an excellent possibility to select optimal sailing routes in difficult ice conditions such as those that were encountered by this expedition. SAR images were also used for planning of operations prior to the expedition. This study compares sub-satellite sea-ice observations with RADARSAT SAR as well as Okean side-looking radar (SLR) signatures of the major ice types and features found in the Kara Sea during winter. Wide-swath SAR images will become available from several new satellites in the near future, such as Envisat, scheduled in 2001, and RADARSAT-2, in 2002. Satellite SAR images will therefore play an increasingly important role in operational ice monitoring both in the Northern Sea Route and in other ice areas.

The subject of retreating global sea-ice extent is a matter of grave concern, and any new method that promises reliable information about past ice-extent parameters must be welcomed. However, the method proposed by De la Mare should be viewed with caution for four reasons. First, his predictions of sea-ice extent do not correspond with known observations of sea-ice extent from research published in 1936 and 1972. Second, his predictions correlate much more closely with the whale-sighting data recorded by Hansen (1936). Third, since Hansen's sea-ice extent data do not correspond closely with his whalesighting data, it must be questioned whether whale-based data should be used for retrospective predictions relating to sea-ice extent. And finally, information from the IWC indicates that De la Mare's datasets are not considered accurate. Predicting sea-ice edge extent is complex, and, it would seem, a purely biological approach is not necessarily the most accurate method to adopt.