Very significant progress has been made during the last decade towards an understanding of the nature of frostbite. Furthermore, recommended treatment today is so drastically different from the generally accepted practice of only a few years ago that it seems most important for modern methods to be understood and applied as widely and rapidly as possible. Although this article has been written primarily for those interested in climbing and exploring in high mountains, it is hoped that the data in it may prove as useful to the lowland traveller or outdoor labourer as to the mountaineer.

Seventy years ago Fridtjof Nansen and thirteen companions drifted across the Arctic Ocean in the specially designed ship, Fram. The drift took three years because the sea ice cover governs movements of a surface ship, allowing a ship's commanding officer only an occasional freedom of choice of direction in which to move his ship. In contrast, during August 1958, the nuclear-powered submarine, USS Nautilus, under the command of Captain W. R. Anderson, crossed the Arctic Ocean in ninety-six hours, using the open sea that lies beneath the ice. In further demonstration of the capability of submarines to sail the Arctic Ocean, the USS Skate departed from New London, Connecticut, and the USS Seadragon from Pearl Harbour, Hawaii, proceeded to the Arctic Ocean, and on 31 July 1962 met each other at a prearranged point and time underneath the sea ice.

The clear, bright twilight of the northern summer night offers to a keen observer a number of beautiful natural phenomena. Occasionally, about an hour after sunset, a delicate veil of clear bluish-white colour appears over the northern horizon, so tenuous that only a trained observer would be aware of its presence. Sometimes, however, this so-called noctilucent cloud exhibits much brighter billows, bands and other features reminiscent of common cirrus cloud formations. Noctilucent clouds consist of a layer of particulate matter, concentrated by some mechanism in the vicinity of the mesopause (the temperature minimum) at an altitude of 80 to 85 km. Because of their great height they are illuminated by the sun's rays when lower layers of the atmosphere at normal cloud heights lie in the earth's shadow; they can be seen when there is sufficient contrast between the light scattered by the cloud particles and the light scattered by the air molecules in the line of sight. These conditions are fulfilled when the sun is between about 4° and 12° below the horizon.

In 1958, at the close of the International Geophysical Year, the National Science Foundation (NSF) of the United States initiated long-term plans for the support of Antarctic biological research. These plans included the erection and outfitting of a modest, but modern, biological laboratory at the United States station at “McMurdo” on Ross Island in the late summer and early winter 1959. With the increasingly diversified biological research programmes, and with the active construction and supply programmes in subsequent years, the biological laboratory has now become one of the largest Antarctic research facilities for a single scientific discipline.