In 1850, five expeditions sailed for Baffin Bay with the common purpose of searching the Canadian Arctic for Sir John Franklin's missing North-west Passage expedition. They were all headed for different destinations and should have found themselves wintering many hundreds of miles apart; but, as chance would have it, three of them, led by Captain Horatio T. Austin, RN, Admiral Sir John Ross and the whaling master William Penny, were thrown together by ice conditions and by events. They wintered in close proximity to one another and were obliged to divide among themselves the search of the surrounding area. Ross's little private venture was too poorly equipped to contribute much, but the other two achieved very promising results: Austin's men discovered the first traces of the Franklin expedition on Devon Island and, in cooperation with Penny, located Franklin's first winter quarters on Beechey Island. In the following spring, sledge parties went out to explore hundreds of miles of new coastline; Austin found no further trace of Franklin, but Penny found persuasive evidence to suggest that the missing expedition had sailed up Wellington Channel (as, indeed, it had done, though it had not remained in that area). With the work of the travelling parties concluded, and after some conversation between Austin and Penny on 11 August 1851, all three expeditions set course for home.

When oil was discovered at Prudhoe Bay on Alaska's North Slope in 1968, the Eskimo villages of the region scattered around the ten-billion-barrel oil field were similar to most other rural native villages in the state: poor and isolated, with high unemployment, little or no prospect for local economic development, and dependent on federal and state programmes for minimum levels of education, medical care, and other services. Soon after the Prudhoe Bay discovery, however, Eskimo leaders on the North Slope began taking steps toward creation of a borough—a form of local or regional government in Alaska somewhat like a county elsewhere in the United States, but potentially having more extensive powers of taxation and regulation, and greater independence from the state government, than county governments typically possess. Incorporated in 1972, the North Slope Borough covers an area of 228 800 km2 and makes up about 15 per cent of the land area of Alaska. Within its boundaries lie the 93 435 km2 National Petroleum Reserve and most of the 35 560 km2 Arctic National Wildlife Range; both of these areas are under the jurisdiction of the federal Department of Interior. Located between these two federal land areas is the Prudhoe Bay oil field complex, which occupies state lands leased to the oil companies. Extending south from the oil field and crossing the borough's southern border is 270 km of the 1 270 km trans-Alaska oil pipeline.

Satellite images of Ronne and Filchner ice shelves show a variety of surface features many of which are believed to indicate flow lines in the ice. Sufficient imagery is now available from Landsat satellites to plot these features from mosaics. Although some of the features have been recognized from aircraft, it was not until an overall view was provided that the true extent of the features and their relationship to the major ice streams became apparent. Using this evidence together with published ice thickness data from radio echo and seismic sounding, flow patterns within the ice shelves and tributary glaciers can be inferred.

During December 1978 the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) undertook its sixth and final season of long-range airborne radio echo sounding (RES) and magnetometry in Antarctica in cooperation with the US National Science Foundation Division of Polar Programmes (NSF-DPP) and the Electromagnetics Institute of the Technical University of Denmark (TUD). The 1978–79 season (DF–79) was part of a long-term programme of glaciological and geophysical investigation of the Antarctic ice sheet (Drewry and Meldrum 1978a; 1978b). The broad aims have been to extend a 100-km grid network over Antarctica for a study of surface form, thickness, internal structure, rheology, thermodynamics, electrical properties, basal conditions and processes, and sub-ice geology.

The 1979 Cambridge Spitsbergen expedition consisted of 13 members and was in the field from mid-June to late August. An advance party of seven left England on 18 June, arrived in Longyearbyen by scheduled flight, and then continued to the base building ‘Mexico’ in Ny-Alesund by chartered Cessna 185. The members were: W. B. Harland (expedition leader, geologist), P. Waddams (geologist), M. F.Chantrey (boat captain), S. G. Chandler (engineer), A. S. D. McCracken, T. D. Parker and J. H. Nebelsick (geological assistants)

The Minke Whale (Balaenoptera acutorostrata) represents the last major baleen whale resource of the Southern Ocean. Concerted exploitation for Minke Whales began in the 1971–72 season, so that it is especially important now that management of this species be placed on an adequate scientific basis.

Despite the accumulation of a considerable amount of basic information on the biological and population parameters of the species remarkably early in its history of exploitation (Ohsumi and others, 1970; Ohsumi and Masaki, 1975; Masaki, 1979), reliable estimates of stock size have proved extremely elusive. Initially, population estimates had to be based entirely on sightings (Ohsumi and Masaki, 1971) as trends in catch per unit of effort were not discernible. These estimates were variable, and sensitive to the extrapolation procedures used to cover areas or seasons for which no data were available. Eventually a decline in catch per unit effort was detected in one Southern Hemisphere Area, Area IV (70°E to 130°E), although this was not statistically significant (IWC, 1977). Most of the recent population estimates have been calculated (directly or indirectly) from an analysis of the decline in Area IV, with the results extrapolated to other Southern Hemisphere areas, based on relative densities from sightings information. Despite a rigorous analysis of catch per unit effort data at the Seattle meeting of the Scientific Committee of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in May 1978, there was much variability in the Minke Whale population estimates—as much as 3.5 times, depending on the assumptions made (IWC, 1979)—causing the adequacy of assessments based solely on data from catch per unit effort to be questioned. The variability arose with the adoption of a deliberately conservative regime of exploitation (which should produce only a small change in relative abundance), and the reduced amount (and localized nature) of the effort used. Moreover, the only independent data available was based on sightings, and was too variable to place any confidence in detecting significant changes in abundance.

The thirty-first annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) was held in London, 9–14 July 1979, under the chairmanship of T. Asgeirsson (Iceland). Since June 1978, five countries joined the commission, Chile, Republic of Korea, Peru, Seychelles and Spain, and attended the annual meeting for the first time as members. Sweden which had rejoined the commission, was last represented at the fifteenth meeting in 1963. There are now 23 member nations, of which 10 are at present engaged in commercial whaling. Commissioners from all member countries were present, together with observers from six non-member governments, FAO, UNEP, international scientific bodies and conservation and animal welfare organizations

Polar Record, Vol 19, No 123, September 1979, p 614–16. ‘Otter Glacier’ was officially named Armstrong Glacier in 1976.