Aleksandr Vasil'yevich Kolchak is undoubtedly best remembered by history for the role he played in the Russian civil war, and especially for his role as ‘Supreme Ruler of All the Russias’, in sole command of the White Russian armies in Siberia and with his seat of government at Omsk (Fleming, 1963, p 111). Probably the best-known incident of his entire career is the one that ended it: in the early hours of 7 February 1920, by the light of a lorry's headlights, he was executed by a Bol'shevik firing squad beneath the walls of Irkutsk prison, and his body bundled through a hole in the ice of the Ushakovka, where it flows past the prison to its confluence with the Angara (Fleming, 1963, p 216; Grondijs, 1939, p 55).

The Australasian Antarctic Expedition, 1912–14, led by Douglas Mawson, encountered incredibly strong, persistent katabatic winds at Cape Denison and along the coastal stretches of Terre Adélie and George V land (Fig 1). The mean wind speed at Cape Denison was 19.3 ms−1 [43.2 mph] which far surpassed all previous surface wind records. The French expedition of 1950–52 to Port Martin, some 60 km west of Cape Denison, provided confirmation of extraordinary windiness of the region. ordinary windiness of the region. According to Mather and Miller (1967), the winds at coastal Terre Adélie and George V Land are about 70 per cent greater than those recorded at stations similarly located at the foot of the steep ice escarpment. Table 1 lists the mean monthly resultant winds at Cape Denison and Port Martin, along with four other coastal stations known to be influenced by katabatic winds. Included in the table is the record of Dumont d'Urville, situated along the same coastal stretch as Cape Denison and Port Martin. Despite its location on an island 5 km from the base of the ice slopes, Dumont d'Urville frequently experiences strong katabatic winds comparable to most stations located at the base of the steep coastal ice slope. Its wind record reflects the strong katabatic component along Terre Adelie and George V Land.

The Dry Valleys of southern Victoria Land, Antarctica, lying some 75 km west of McMurdo station, form an arid, ice-free area of roughly 2 500 km2. Since the late 1950s, this region has provided a remarkable opportunity for geoscientific studies of the exposed surface rocks, within easy reach of logistic support at McMurdo and Scott bases on Ross Island (Fig 1). As a result of a study of Lake Vanda in the Wright Valley, which began during the 1963–64 summer field season, scientists from the United States, New Zealand and Japan supported the view that further advances in our knowledge of the Dry Valleys would require an examination of the unconsolidated material, and the geothermal regime at lake sites, using direct shallow drilling techniques. As drilling techniques and interestin the geological history of the McMurdo region as a whole (encompassing the Transantarctic Mountains, Ross Island, McMurdo Sound and the Dry Valleys) developed, an international, multidisciplinary project—the Dry Valley Drilling Project (DVDP)—was conceived. By 1969 the US National Science Foundation (NSF) had decided to coordinate proposals from scientists wishing to drill the first intermediate and deep cores into the sediment and rock of Antarctica; the aim, a reconstruction of Antarctic geological history that traditional surface or near-surface studies alone could never achieve. Initially, the approach was to be a sub-surface physical, chemical and biological examination of theDry Valleys, but as the project developed it encompassed studies of the Ross Island volcanic complex and McMurdo Sound sediments.

Two of the outstanding problems in Antarctic earth sciences are the early history of the East Antarctic ice sheet, and the history of the Transantarctic Mountains. These two problems may well be linked, for if the initial uplift of the Transantarctic Mountains was sufficient to promote a permanent ice cap, this may have triggered formation of the East Antarctic ice sheet in the manner oudined by Drewry (1975, p 266). Glomar Challenger in 1973 made the first major breakthrough concerning early history of the ice sheet by recovering cores from the centre of the Ross Sea; they show that ice rafting began there 25 Ma BP and has been going on ever since (Hayes and others, 1975). However, the core data give little indication of the extent of ice cover, or of the climatic changes that led to expanded ice cover which produced the ice-rafted debris.

Past forecasts by geologists of potentially large oil and natural gas reserves in the North American Arctic (eg, Prudhoe Bay, the Mackenzie delta, and the Canadian Arctic islands) are coming closer to reality. Results from Canmar (Canadian Marine Drilling Ltd of Calgary) drill ships working in the southern Beaufort Sea continue to support the prediction of considerable hydrocarbon deposits in this area. The most significant discovery, gas amounting to 0.48–0.50 trillion m3 [17–18 trillion ft3] was made by Panarctic Oils Limited in the Canadian High Arctic, in particular the Drake field off Melville Island and the surrounding region (Star Phoenix, 1980a). Panarctic Oils is a government-industry consortium; Petro-Canada owns 45 per cent of the shares and provides the bulk of the exploration budget.