Recent decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada, the Constitution Act 1982, and the establishment of the Office of Native Claims, would seem to have assured the rapid settlement of outstanding issues regarding aboriginal rights and native title to lands. More recently, the seeming abandonment by government of political and negotiated resolution of these issues has left litigation as the remaining recourse for native groups to protect their interests. The courts, however, have become increasingly demanding in terms of what must be proven in order to make a successful case at law. It is predicted that the costs and technical difficulties of providing such proofs will limit the number of rights cases before the courts, and the chances of success for those that are mounted.

In the austral summer 1986–87, the 75th anniversary of Amundsen's conquest of the South Pole, a sledging party of four from a private expedition, 90° South, set out to retrace his route. This was the culmination of five years of preparations, in which sufficient international support was raised to enable the expedition to reach Antarctica and operate independently, using its own ship, MV Aurora… The expedition's Twin Otter aircraft, flying from New Zealand, staged a unique refuelling operation on an iceberg within the pack ice 160 km from the Balleny Islands. Establishing a temporary base at Bay of Whales, Ross Ice Shelf, on 5 December 1986, the expedition used its aircraft to set up supply depots 220 km apart along the route to the pole. The sledging party with two teams of Greenland huskies crossed the ice shelf and ascended the Axel Heiberg Glacier to the polar plateau, reaching their fourth depot in 86°S in late January. Some 400 km short of the Pole, lack of time compelled the party to return to rendezvous with the ship. Glaciological investigations included the formation of icebergs from the Ross Ice Shelf, and collection of ground truth data to help in evaluating remote sensing data. The team also set up a commemorative plaque close to Amundsen' s cairn on Mount Betty.

In June 1988, at the final session of the Fourth Special Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting in Wellington, New Zealand, the Convention on the Regulation of Antarctic Mineral Resource Activities (CRAMRA) was adopted, bringing to a successful conclusion six years of negotiations. Christopher Beeby, chairman of the discussions, presented the convention as the most important political development affecting Antarctica since the 1959 treaty, especially as it established the ability of the Antarctic Treaty System to reach an internal accommodation even upon matters raising serious political, legal, environmental and other issues. There remain uncertainties regarding the future development of the Antarctic minerals question; for example, when will the minerals convention and the proposed institutional framework come into effect, will its ratification encourage mining, can the fragile Antarctic environment be adequately protected against mining, how will certain key terms and concepts be defined, and will the regime's operation bring latent tensions to the surface? It is also difficult to predict how other governments will react to the convention, in the light of recent UN resolutions on Antarctica. The convention is perceived within the Antarctic Treaty system as a significant development, but it will be some time before a considered evaluation of the Antarctic Minerals Regime can be conducted.

This article outlines the Marginal Ice Zone Experiments (MIZEX), which began in 1983, and summarizes research investigations in Fram Strait during the most recent MIZEX of March and April 1987, involving members of the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI). An important field of investigation was ambient noise in the ice-edge region and the physical processes which produce it.

Eight species of vascular plants were previously known from subantarctic Heard Island. Three additional species, Montia fontana, Ranunculus biternatus and Poa annua, were discovered during the 1986 austral summer. Details of their habitat and known distribution on the island, and their possible means of arrival, are discussed.

Central North Greenland, an uninhabited and rarely visited region bordering the Arctic Ocean, supports arctic hare, collared lemming, wolf, arctic fox, polar bear, stoat, ringed seal and musk ox. Their distribution and abundance were noted during Geological Survey of Greenland expeditions in 1984–85, which visited virtually all land areas in the region, including nunataks and islands. Bones of reindeer, bearded seal and narwhal were also found. Ringed seal and reindeer are known to have been present in the region by the early Holocene.

The steamship Telefon, an eight-year-old steel freighter used for carrying cargos to the Antarctic whaling ships of Chr. Christensen, struck a reef at the entrance to Admiralty Bay, South Shetland Islands, on 26 December 1908. Salvaged through the enterprise of Capt A. A. Andresen, of the Sociedad Ballenera de Magellanes, she was grounded in Port Foster, Deception Island, and eventually refloated and repaired to continue working with the whaling fleet.

In August–September 1987 a group of geophysicists, led by M. Ander of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and M. Zumberge of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, performed a geophysical experiment to determine the value of the gravitational constant, G. Using the DYE-3 borehole on the Greenland ice cap, the experiment was intended to provide evidence concerning possible scale variations in G, and thus for non-Newtonian gravity. This report describes the background to the experiment and the radio echo-sounding survey carried out to provide terrain corrections for the gravity model. The experiment showed values of G differing from laboratory determinations by margins which considerably exceed experimental error.