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This paper unpacks the material practices and narrative strategies surrounding the aerial work of the 1924 Oxford University Arctic Expedition to Spitsbergen (now Svalbard). Examining the fluid nature of British tropes of polar heroic masculinities, the paper illustrates the adaptability of such tropes in the face of technological change. Specifically, it demonstrates how aviation was mobilised to construct a masculinist explorer subject conceived as simultaneously traditional and modern at a time when the Heroic Era of British exploration was said to have subsided. Significantly, the 1924 expedition was organised largely by and for undergraduate explorers, many of whom saw polar travel as a rite of passage not unlike military service. Hence, the expedition narrative connects to a culture of undergraduate Arctic exploration emerging from Oxbridge during the 1920s. In tracing the 1924 air programme, the paper examines the tensions between polar heroics and new technologies of travel, the significance of nationalist rivalries and failed ambitions in negotiating the status of polar aviation, and problematises the separation of aerial and earth-bound perspectives on polar travel. Focusing on the labour dedicated to bringing aerial technology to the north, the corporeality of the aerial perspective, and iterations of the vertical reciprocity between ground and air, the paper draws out how aircraft was configured both as an instrument for dispassionate observation and as a legitimate vessel for passionate exploration, mirroring and adapting nineteenth century rhetoric of British polar heroics. It is suggested that understanding such historically rooted mechanisms and their adaptability to cultural and technological change remain relevant in terms of contextualising British imaginaries of the Arctic. • Traces the aerial programme of the 1924 Oxford University Arctic Expedition. • Analyses adaptations of heroic travel narratives to technological change. • Hones in on cultures of varsity exploration emerging from Oxbridge in the 1920s. • Problematises the separation of aerial and earth-bound perspectives on polar travel. • Aviation used to form masculinist explorer subject, at once traditional and modern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Domestication has particular salience in archaeology, and numerous recent theoretical papers describe this process as a set of evolutionary, ongoing, social, and material relationships between humans and select other species. In contrast, analytical papers on the domestication of dogs nearly always involve a search for their origins as marked by changes in genes and morphologies. This article explores this contrast through the examination of dog remains from the Iron Age Ust’-Polui site in the western Siberian Arctic. Many of the numerous dogs represented at this site were killed and probably consumed when young, likely as part of sacrifices. Others at the site were intentionally buried. Ust’-Polui also contains abundant evidence of advanced dog sledding, including probable harness parts and portions of several complex sleds. Sacrificing and otherwise killing dogs is a domestication practice, as these activities are a form of selective breeding. Domestication of dogs at Ust’-Polui and elsewhere is more than selective breeding, as it is enabled and dependent upon specific landscapes, built things, and other species. At Ust’-Polui these at a minimum included a rich local environment, sleds and harness swivels, and freshwater fish, all of which intertwined in making the particular domestic relationships at the site possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Variability in and significance of hunter-gatherer aggregation sites are reviewed. • The Cadfael archaeological site is a Dorset aggregation in the Canadian Arctic. • The aggregation site contains stone longhouses as well as ritual features. • Change over time at the site results from interaction between Dorset and Inuit. Most hunter-gatherer lifeways revolve around periodic large gatherings – aggregations – that serve as social, ritual, and economic anchors for their annual cycles. However, in archaeological contexts they are often difficult to recognize. This paper describes and interprets a particularly large and well-preserved example of a warm season aggregation site dating to the Late Dorset period in the eastern North American Arctic. This site extends for over 750 m along coastal beach ridges and contains four boulder-outlined "longhouses" of up to 38 m in length as well as hundreds of other features used for storage, cooking, and ritual activities. In addition to interpreting the range of activities occurring on the site, this paper discusses the clear evidence for change over time in the ways its inhabitants interacted with the built environment, and with each other. Because these changes took place mainly during the 13th century CE, they likely represent a reaction to the arrival in this region of ancestral Inuit, who migrated from Alaska during this period and ultimately replaced Dorset populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amongst historians of geography, very little attention has been paid to Franz Boas's ambitious vision for ‘The Study of Geography’ published in Science in 1887. Historians of anthropology have, on the contrary, understood Boas's paper on geography as the cornerstone of his developing anthropological interest. This paper argues that the reason for this revolves around competing understandings of canonicity between geography and anthropology. ‘The Study of Geography’, alone among Boas's early geographical writings, is placed centrally within the anthropological canon. The paper shows how such interpretations locate a Boasian conversion to an ostensibly more mature disciplinary practice to his Arctic fieldwork on Baffin Island, 1883–84. In doing so, Boas was canonized, as were some of his texts and practices. The effect was that post-1945 North American anthropology was acutely Boasian. This paper disputes aspects of this conventional narrative, using aspects of Boas's corpus and education to argue that there was a more complex relationship between discussions in German human geography in the 1880s and the development of American cultural anthropology into the twentieth century. In doing so, the paper examines the relationship of Boas, his texts and practices, to the geographical canon and notes his recent recovery in French scholarship. In consequence, the implications of these canonical turns and returns for conceptions of canonicity in geography are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Measuring the depth of the sea in the early nineteenth century was a complicated but vital component in helping ensure safe passage through treacherous coastal waters, and increasingly as the century progressed, in providing scientific insights into previously scarcely-touched regions of the globe. However, no one sounding device was universally agreed upon to provide reliable results. In consequence, the resulting cartographic representation of the deep sea was error strewn and open to continual modification. This paper focuses on depth recording during British Polar expeditions between 1818 and 1845, drawing on the published expedition narratives, as accounts of sounding as science at sea. The paper engages with work on the role of inscriptions to suggest that expedition captains were forced continually to perform new soundings, and to construct new maps of the polar seas as hey experienced them. In showing how soundings were part of a wider network of scientific investigation and navigation, and how the collection and recording of depth measurements with precision instruments was vital in ensuring epistemological credibility, the paper for the first time scrutinises the sounding instruments and the practices of ship-board science in this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Tidewater glaciers in Kongsfjorden, Svalbard, are retreating, and it is expected that they will terminate on land at some time in the future. Plumes, the submerged runoff emerging at the bases of tidewater glacier fronts, contribute to large-scale circulation within the inner fjord. A transition to a fjord with only land-terminating glaciers will affect the fjord circulation, with further implications for the biogeochemistry and ecosystem in Kongsfjorden. In this paper we compare the present and predicted future circulation using the ocean model system ROMS, and identify and quantify changes resulting from the altered forcing. Removal of subglacial discharge due to retreating tidewater glaciers causes substantial reduction of subsurface volume fluxes, and hence exchange rates, in the inner part of the fjord, and results in enhanced stratification during summer months. The increase in fjord extent due to tidewater glacier retreat results in a slight increase in tidal velocities, in particular overtide components, but this effect is not strong enough to compensate for the reduction in current velocities due to removal of freshwater plumes at glacier fronts. The freshwater content (practical salinity < 34.8) in the fjord during the melting season is predicted to increase in the future, primarily due to enhanced retention of freshwater in the inner parts of the fjord. However, freshwater in the future will mostly be confined to a relatively thin surface layer whereas at present freshwater is found in a thicker layer, in particular in the proximity of the tidewater glacier fronts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is the third in a series of papers on the Chupa Estuary, White Sea, Russia, and investigates tidal and seasonal fate and fluxes of materials from a small fjord-like Arctic estuary to the coastal zone. Respective companion papers have detailed the hydrography (Estuar. Coast. Shelf Sci. 48 (1999) 1) and metals in sediments and mussels (Estuar. Coast. Shelf Sci. 48 (1999) 13). Two seasonal cruises were undertaken in summer (July 1994) and autumn (September, 1995). Nutrients (nitrate, nitrite, phosphate and silicate) and dissolved oxygen were recorded along the estuarine longitudinal axis and at diurnal anchor stations at key points in the estuary. The fluvial nutrient input was negligible throughout. Nutrient concentrations showed considerable inter-tidal and spring–neap variability. Evidence from isopycnals showed that this variability is related to water exchange processes in the deep basins where renewal takes place within the space of a tidal cycle. Deep-water renewal and cascading is more pronounced on neap tides due to reduced turbulent mixing. The downwelling of seawater ensures that the deep basin waters are well ventilated, and provides a means of coupling between bottom and surface water nutrient pools whereby remineralized nutrients are dispersed and recirculated. Nutrient fluxes to the coastal zone were quantified in autumn as a net import of dissolved inorganic silicate (DSi) and dissolved inorganic phosphate (DIP) at 2.10 and 0.51 mol s−1, respectively, and a dissolved inorganic nitrate + nitrite (DIN) export of 1.72 mol s−1. In July DIN, DIP and DSi were exported at 3.57, 0.41 and 7.04 mol s−1, respectively. An assessment of hydrodynamical parameters shows that the circulation is complex throughout the estuary, and so the resolved fluxes are semi-quantitative. Fjord-like circulation results in a large export of inorganic nutrients in the lower nutrient-rich layers compared to the incoming intermediate layers, which drives the system towards N-limitation in both summer and autumn, thus lending support to the concept of N-limiting tendencies observed in other sub-Arctic areas. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Coastal fishery systems in the Arctic are undergoing rapid change. This paper examines the ways in which Inuit fishers experience and respond to such change, using a case study from Pangnirtung, Canada. The work is based on over two years of fieldwork, during which semi-structured interviews (n = 62), focus group discussions (n = 6, 31 participants) and key informant interviews (n = 25) were conducted. The changes that most Inuit fishers experience are: changes in sea-ice conditions, Inuit people themselves, the landscape and the seascape, fish-related changes, and changes in weather conditions, markets and fish selling prices. Inuit fishers respond to change individually as well as collectively. Fishers' responses were examined using the characteristics of a resilience-based conceptual framework focusing on place, human agency, collective action and collaboration, institutions, indigenous and local knowledge systems, and learning. Based on results, this paper identified three community-level adaptive strategies, which are diversification, technology use and fisheries governance that employs a co-management approach. Further, this work recognised four place-specific attributes that can shape community adaptations, which are Inuit worldviews, Inuit-owned institutions, a culture of sharing and collaborating, and indigenous and local knowledge systems. An examination of the ways in which Inuit fishers experience and respond to change is essential to better understand adaptations to climate change. This study delivers new insights to communities, scientists, and policymakers to work together to foster community adaptation. • Assesses adaptation to climate change in fisheries communities. • Examines how indigenous fishers experience and respond to change. • Climate change creates multiple changes in Arctic fisheries systems. • Diversification, technology, and co-management are three adaptive strategies. • Worldviews, institutions, culture, and knowledge systems can shape adaptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A comparative perspective is applied in analyzing the large-scale utilization of Arctic natural resources driven by economies and agents outside the Arctic and subarctic regions. This paper focuses on whaling since the sixteenth century, and on the development of mining from the nineteenth century to the present. The European sector of the Arctic and subarctic regions including the high-Arctic archipelago of Spitsbergen provides the main cases for this study. The social, economic and environmental contexts and consequences of northern industry are considered; as part of this line of research, the little-known symbolic and geopolitical uses of industrial field installations are considered. The northern transfer of Western technoscience, including scientific navigation, colonial geography, steam-propulsion and aviation, often failed initially despite much enthusiasm and underwent painstaking on-site modification. In this industrialists and other Arctic entrepreneurs attempted to control a complex combination of factors including the sparse local population, the lack of major infrastructure, and the environmental impact of their own businesses. This combined with the social problems of keeping peace among collaborators and competitors under isolated and lawless conditions. In conclusion, the greatest challenges to industry in the Arctic throughout modern history were local and social rather than climatic or geopolitical. Indigenous interests were long disregarded while Arctic seas and some land areas were exploited by Western nations as unregulated commons. Not only nature and local inhabitants but also the industry itself suffered from increased scales of operations. The record of Arctic extractive industries over four hundred years reveals a need to develop and share relevant environmental and socio-economic knowledge and to develop international regulations and instruments such as industry certification to guarantee sustainable northern resource utilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper argues that indigenous peoples'' responses to climate change are better understood in relation to emerging notions of citizenship than to climate change crisis narratives. The latter, like development narratives, are often used to license the intervention of experts in debates about resource management and conservation. Dominant climate change narratives about the Arctic emphasise the power of global climate systems to threaten northern communities by situating them as being intrinsically ‘at risk’. These narratives envisage Arctic citizenship within very narrow parameters which have largely masked the voices of northern citizens. Definitions of ecosystem resilience, while providing a framework for comparing disparate cultural and ecological contexts, are predicated on avoiding systemic collapse. It is argued that such definitions heighten the sense of risk implicit in climate change impacts. This may ultimately impede the development of different aspects of civic participation by northern citizens with climate change policy opportunities. Policy responses across a range of diverse geographical contexts require new narratives that put communities back into the calculus of risk and decision-making. One way to be more critical about the language of climate change narratives is to evaluate the extent to which they can account for, and mitigate, growing inequalities of power and wealth. Studies in the historical reception of science narratives are proposed as a better approach for making grounded comparisons of the discursive strategies with which climate change narratives are made to work. This also helps to bridge discussions of climate change across regions like the Arctic and Africa, which share much in common, but are too often studied in isolation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The paper examines the meio- and macrobenthic responses to physical disturbance and sediment instabilities in a small Arctic glacier-fed river estuary. Zajiczkowski and Włodarska-Kowalczuk [Zajiczkowski, M., Włodarska-Kowalczuk, M., 2007. Dynamic sedimentary environments of Arctic glacier-fed river estuary (Adventfjorden, Svalbard). I. Flux, deposition, and sediment dynamics. Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science 74(1–2), 285–296] distinguished three zones in Adventfjorden (west Spitsbergen) estuary: the tidal flat, the slope (high sedimentation, frequent sediment slides), the central basin (low sedimentation, stable sediments). The numbers of individuals and species of meio- and macrofauna were very low on the tidal flat. The total densities of meio- and macrofauna were significantly lower on the slope of the glacio-fluvial delta than in the central basin. Only the macrofauna responded to sediment instabilities on the slope by a significant decrease in total biomass. Nematodes inhabiting the slope sediments were larger than those in the central basin, although there was no significant difference in the size of harpacticoids in the two zones. The frequently disturbed, resuspended, and redeposited slope sediments were colonized by the opportunistic polychaete Capitella capitata agg. and by the high sedimentation resistant polychaetes Chaetozone setosa agg. and Cossura longocirrata. Tube-dwelling, sedentary, or suspension-feeding fauna only occurred at the central basin stations. The species richness and ratio of surface-dwelling to burrowing deposit-feeders in the macrobenthic communities decreased towards the river mouths. The differences in the taxonomic composition of communities inhabiting the sediments of the slope and the central basin were less pronounced in meiofauna (studied at a higher taxonomic level) than in the macrofauna (identified to the species level). Nevertheless, the differences were significant for both benthic compartments (ANOSIM test, P <0.05). The simultaneous survey of meio- and macrobenthic communities in an Arctic glacier-fed river estuary shows that both benthic compartments are sensitive to sediment instabilities and physical disturbance caused by high sedimentation and frequent sediment gravity flows. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Although historians of the long eighteenth century have broadened our understanding of the concept of improvement beyond the agrarian reforms of a landed elite, to other social groups and geographical settings, the private ownership and access to the resources of the oceans and seas are phenomena that have until recently been largely neglected. This paper examines the concept of improvement in the maritime context by exploring a range of tensions between whaling as a form of economic private self-interest on the one hand and as a source of disinterested, virtuous knowledge about the oceans and the animal kingdom on the other hand. William Scoresby, a leading whaling captain and improver, embodied the spirit of those northern European nations which competed to improve the maritime sphere of the northern ocean by implementing different social and technical schemes of enlightenment. He went further than developing new and more efficient and profitable whaling technologies by cultivating disinterested virtue through providing privately obtained natural history specimens from the Greenland Seas for gentleman of science. This in turn gave him entry to participate in the civic circles of polite science and imperial networks of natural history. Although the ascent from industrial whaling in pursuit of profit to disinterested whaling in pursuit of science and exploration made perfect sense to Scoresby, his implicit social improvement laid him open to criticism from those who for different reasons disapproved of the marriage of industrial artisanship and polite natural history. The complexity of Scoresby''s identity as an improver is revealed through Robert Jameson, the Professor of Natural History at Edinburgh University, who jealously controlled access to Scoresby''s specimens, research, and publications from the Greenland Seas, while simultaneously promoting Scoresby as an intrepid, disinterested captain capable of representing the nation as an Arctic explorer. Through Jameson''s Wernerian Natural History Society, they called on government to finance Arctic exploration to reach the North Pole, benefit science, and subsidise the costs through whaling. Their plans were consistent with a long tradition of commercial improvement serving state interests. The Royal Navy''s response, to wrest control of Arctic exploration, was by contrast, not a rejection of improvement per se, but rather a determination to place itself at the centre of improvement, by renewing the Board of Longitude with elite, improvement-minded, gentlemen of science, while damning Scoresby with faint praise as an accomplished artisan. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Snow plays an important role in providing atmospherically derived semi-volatile organic compounds (SVOCs) to regions of high latitude and altitude. The accumulated winter snowpack serves as a reservoir for SVOCs, which may then be released to arctic/alpine catchments during seasonal snowmelt or entrained into deeper layers of snow and ice. This paper provides a review of the occurrence of SVOCs in snow, exploring sampling methodologies and field measurements. Furthermore, chemical fate following snowfall and the propensity of SVOCs to undergo revolatilization with snow metamorphosis are examined along with air–snow partitioning and the role of physical parameters such as snow density and snow surface area in controlling vapor-sorbed levels. Snowmelt and firnification processes are described, and the latter are related to SVOC measurements made in deeper snow layers and glacial ice cores. Evidence is provided that suggests that those SVOCs that possess relatively higher snow interfacial/air partitioning coefficients (K iasnow) or lower Henry''s Law constants may be more efficiently retained in snow, with implications for the occurrence of currently used pesticides in the temperate mountain snowpack. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper presents the analysis and interpretation of one instance of hunter–gatherer economic intensification, based on three sites in the Mackenzie River Delta, Northwest Territories, Arctic Canada. Quantification of the very well-preserved archaeofaunas from these sites allows a particularly high-resolution analysis of intensification, because faunal resources represent nearly 100% of all food consumed in the region. Exploratory multivariate statistics are applied to the samples, in order to assess the degree to which they vary, and the degree to which faunal variability coincides with chronological relationships among the contexts. The archaeofaunas are then assessed in relation to three component strategies of intensification [after Morrison, K., 1994. The intensification of production: archaeological approaches. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 1 (2), 111–159]: “specialization,” the economic focus on a narrow range of resources; “diversification,” the increasing reliance on a broader range of resources; and “investment,” the development of new technologies and procurement strategies. Results indicate that in the Mackenzie Delta case, the economy remained specialized throughout the sequence, but diversification and investment increased during later periods. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Although measures of evenness of archaeological faunas are increasingly used in zooarchaeological analyses, the widely accepted hypothesis that increasing evenness should indicate increasing dietary breadth has not been tested. In this paper, I examine three factors that can contribute to changing evenness values—changing encounter rates with high-ranked prey types, changing diet breadth, and similarity between the return rates of the highest-ranked resources—and discuss ways of controlling the latter two factors. I then test the “evenness hypothesis” using ethnographic data collected by Smith [E.A. Smith, Evolutionary Ecology and the Analysis of Human Foraging Behavior: An Inuit Example from the East Coast of Hudson Bay, Ph.D. thesis, Cornell University, 1980, E.A. Smith, Inujjamiut Foraging Strategies: Evolutionary Ecology of an Arctic Hunting Economy, Aldine de Gruyter, Hawthorne, NY, 1991] in Inukjuak, northern Canada. Although the results support the evenness hypothesis, they also show that the nature of archaeological data may make evenness measures difficult to use accurately. Evenness can be used to understand changing prehistoric encounter rates with prey, but many conditions must be met for it to do so. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The present paper provides the first record of ingestion of microplastics in natural context by Gammarus setosus from Svalbard Archipelago. The plastic particles were identified both by Nile Red staining and Micro FT-IR spectroscopy. The species studied ingests microplastic particles in natural conditions if present in its habitat, probably mistaking them as food. The microplastic particles ingested may be available for uptake to predators that consume this Arctic amphipod, producing consequences to the food web. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]