There are many young people in New Zealand, in Australia, here in Canada, and especially those who knew him in Cambridge, in Birmingham, and in his home town of Tewkesbury, who will mourn the passing of Sir Raymond Priestley as friend and counsellor. I think it is fitting that I should write my tribute to his sterling qualities, since I have known him for 64 long years as a friend, as a collaborator and, for 60 years, as a relation by marriage with Edith Mary Priestley, one of his sisters.

C. E. Borchgrevink was born in Christiania (present-day Oslo) in 1864. His Norwegian father was a lawyer, and his English mother was a Miss Ridley. Little is known about his early years, but he said he had part of his education at Gjertsen College. He was a full-time student from the winter term 1885 to the winter term 1888 at the Royal Forestry School, Tharandt, Saxony, but seems to have obtained no certificate or diploma; later he mentioned that he had been a pupil of Professor E. Nobbe. When he was in his thirties he told H. J. Bull that he had been educated at Christiania University, but there is no evidence to support this. He also said he had served as a boy or apprentice in the Borghild in 1878, crossing the Atlantic in her, but there are no details.

In reviewing the conservation of Arctic fauna, it may be useful to describe what is meant, geographically and ecologically, by the word Arctic, as it is used here. Geographical boundaries are not often the same as ecological boundaries, and the Arctic Circle itself has no zoogeographical significance. Permanently ice-covered land and treeless lands with permanently frozen subsoil in the Northern Hemisphere would be included in any definition of the Arctic region, and in northern countries the timber line constitutes a satisfactory southern limit for the region in question. In mountains, it is altitude rather than latitude that gives an Arctic character to climate and landscape, as in the Urals, the mountain chain of Scandinavia (south to 59°N) and eastern Siberia, and the Rocky Mountains of North America.

In the last few years there has been much interest in various physiological processes known to take place within toothed whales, dolphins, and porpoises (odontocetes). Such processes as respiration, audio-communication, echolocation, and buoyancy control have all been studied (Evans, 1967; Caldwell and Caldwell, 1968; Matthews, 1968; Poulter, 1968; Norris, 1968; 1969; Norris and Evans, 1967; Clarke, 1970). The odontocetes have been found to possess a large, fat-rich body called a “melon” in their foreheads, directly in front of the skull. It has been suggested that this melon is an acoustical transducer for transmitting and possibly focusing ultrasonic sound waves into the surrounding water for the purpose of echolocation (Norris, 1968; 1969; Norris and Evans, 1967). Certainly all odontocetes are known to produce orientated beams of sound, generated, it is thought, at the extermities of the animal's nasal plug (Evans and others, 1964; Norris, 1964).

After three years' delay, work started early in 1974 on the construction of the trans-Alaska pipeline from Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic coast of Alaska 1 270 km to Valdez on the Gulf of Alaska (Ronhovde. 1974). Within three years, the line should be delivering 1.2 million barrels per day, a volume that will be increased eventually to a daily flow of 2 million barrels. Gas production on the North Slope of Alaska will probably be exported through Canada to the United States through a 4 184-km pipeline that will cost an estimated $5.7 billion and, if built, will be one of the largest construction projects ever undertaken; the system will also carry Canadian Arctic gas to southern markets. The size of these projects is in themselves impressive, and they have been spawned and are being launched in an atmosphere of controversy and confusion that, in its different way, is equally impressive.

The general large-scale circulation of the global atmosphere has its basic driving mechanism in the equator-poleward temperature gradients in both hemispheres. It has become increasingly obvious over the last few decades that to understand and predict the behaviour of the atmosphere at any point, it is essential to understand the behaviour of the total global fluid system. The Global Atmospheric Research Project (GARP) is an outcome of this recognition. Studies of the heat sinks (the polar regions) are therefore just as important as studies of the heat source (the equatorial regions) to understand the meteorology of the planet. Interest in polar meteorology has undergone many cyclic fluctuations, peaking during the various international polar years and, more recently, during the International Geophysical Year, 1957–58. At the present, the focus of GARP's first objective (improved extended weather forecasts) is on the tropical heat source, where convection and cloud formation and dissipation are still relatively little understood processes. However, the second GARP objective (better understanding of the physical basis of climate) requires more attention to be devoted to the cryosphere, its long-term interaction with oceans and atmosphere, and its role as an indicator of climatic change. The idea of a polar experiment (POLEX) was initially introduced by Treshnikov and others (1968) and by Borisenkov and Treshnikov (1971). A summary of the early history of POLEX was recently given by Weller and Bierly (1973). The two closely related objectives of POLEX that most directly pertain to GARP may be restated in their simplest terms as (1) a better understanding of energy transfer processes and the heat budgets of the polar regions for the purpose of parameterizing them properly in general circulation models and climate models, and (2) provision of adequate data from the polar regions during the First GARP Global Experiment (FGGE) in 1978.