The eleventh successive annual United Nations discussion on the ‘Question of Antarctica’ took place at the close of 1993. In November the UN First Committee, guided by two reports from the UN Secretary-General, adopted a further resolution, which was adopted in December by the General Assembly as resolution A48/80. As usual, UN members, although displaying evidence of a wider international recognition of the regime's merits, proved critical of the Antarctic Treaty System. By contrast, Antarctic Treaty Parties (ATPs) remained reluctant to allow the UN the type of role in Antarctica advocated by their critics. ATPs, following the course adopted in 1985, still refused either to participate in the UN discussions or to vote. As a result, it proved impossible yet again to secure a consensus about either the ‘Question of Antarctica’ in general or the UN's role in Antarctica in particular. One significant advance in 1993 concerned the end of demands advanced since 1985 for South Africa's exclusion from Antarctic meetings, a change prompted by the dismantlement of the apartheid regime. The ‘Question of Antarctica’ is scheduled to be placed on the UN agenda in 1994.

Between 1894 and 1909, Walter Wellman (1858–1934), a Chicago-based journalist and explorer, organized and led five expeditions to reach the North Pole. Wellman launched his most ambitious undertaking in 1906, constructing an extensive base camp complete with an airship hangar on the shoreline of Virgohamn, a small harbor on Danskøya in the Svalbard archipelago. In 1907 and 1909, Wellman's two flights in the dirigible airship America marked the first time a motorized airship had flown in the Arctic. In the summer of 1993, the author surveyed and mapped the extent of the remains of Wellman's camp to discover and document any surviving wreckage of America, and to observe the impact of tourist traffic on the site. This paper describes the 1993 survey of Wellman's base camp at Virgohamn and offers suggestions for its preservation.

Evidence for the disturbance of king penguins (Aptenodytes patagonicus) and other seabirds at sub-Antarctic islands by fixed-wing aircraft making airdrops is reviewed. Based on direct observations of panicking birds at king penguin colonies at Marion Island as Lockheed C-130 Hercules aircraft flew past, it is postulated that the incident at Macquarie Island in 1990 when many king penguins were found dead shortly after a flypast was most likely caused by panic induced by the aircraft's passage. Visits by fixed-wing aircraft to sub-Antarctic islands should be kept to a minimum and no airstrips should be built on them. Specific recommendations are given for fixed-wing aircraft visits to Marion Island, in order to reduce disturbance to king penguins and other seabirds to the absolute minimum. These recommendations should be adopted at all sub-Antarctic islands.

A number of countries are revising management plans for protected areas in Antarctica so that they comply with Annex V to the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty. Annex V allows for ‘identification of zones…in which activities are to be prohibited, restricted or managed.’ A wide range of terms are, and could be, used to meet site-specific zoning needs. If allowed to develop in an ad hoc way, a confusing and inconsistent set of zones would be likely to evolve. This could be avoided by a coordinated and pro-active approach to identifying the zones needed. Based on field observations and examination of current and proposed management plans, a simple, standardised model of five types of zone is proposed: Restricted, Scientific, Tourist, Facilities, and Historic. Their application, where needed, would meet the full range of management needs within specially protected and managed areas in Antarctica.

The Palmer-Pendleton sealing and exploring expedition (1829–1831) was the first American voyage of discovery to the Antarctic that had official government sanction. For the writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), this expedition was an important landmark in an age when science was beginning to change the American continent socially, politically, and geographically. The shift away from Jefferson's agrarian Utopia was marked tangibly by increased industrialisation, the advent of the railroad, the growth of scientific societies, the beginning of elite professionalisation in the sciences, and this major American Antarctic voyage. In the same year as the expedition left the US, Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), philosopher and author, recorded the effect that such scientific and technological changes had wrought upon the literary artist when he characterised the era metaphorically as: ‘the Age of Machinery in every outward and inward sense of that word.’ The belief that a repetitive, blunt mechanism that stifled artistic imagination had entered society led Poe to offer a stark criticism of science and scientific method in his tale ‘MS found in a bottle’ (1832). This tale, written shortly after the return of the Palmer-Pendleton expedition, centres upon a voyage to the Antarctic and embodies some of Poe's finest early writing. Interleaved with the critique of science are contemporary themes of discovery, and the Romantic preoccupation with man's relationship to nature.

The protected nature area system in Russia is well developed in general, although not as well in the Arctic. On 1 January 1994 the total area of all types of Arctic reserves covered about 19.7 million ha, comprising about 10.2% of the area of the Russian Arctic. There are five categories of protected nature areas: strict nature reserwes (zapovedniki), national nature parks (natsional'nyye parki), nature monuments (pamyatniki prirody), special purpose reserves (zakazniki), and nature-ethnic parks (prirodno-etnicheskiye parki). The system of the zapovednik is unique. The oldest strict nature reserve in the Arctic is Kandalakshskiy (1939). Other major nature reserves include Ostrov Vrangelya (created in 1976), Taymyrskiy (1979), Ust-Lenskiy (1985), and Bol'shoy Arkticheskiy (1993). The first nature-ethnic park in the Arctic, Beringiya, was established in 1993. Because of the unstable economic and political situation in Russia, the nature protection system has a difficult time. Furthermore, the legal structure that defines the purpose of and responsibility for these areas is sometimes not completely clear, and a great deal is dependent on presidential decrees that, through time, have limited validity. The cooperation of Russian, western European, and North American scientists who study birds breeding in the Russian Arctic and migration patterns to temperate regions could give major support to the nature re-serves in the Russian Arctic.