This paper concerns affective relations and unexpected interruptions as the planned expansion of an extractive open-pit mining site gathers momentum. The site is a mountain in Varanger, North Norway, criss-crossed by a sand-coloured meshwork of roads that are part of the current infrastructure of a quartzite quarry. Recently purchased by Chinese investors, the mining company Elkem plans a massive expansion of the operations, which will interrupt a wide range of practices and projects, including the migratory movement of reindeer, as well as their grazing patterns. Known as Giemaš amongst Sámi speakers, the mountain is also alluded to as a site of other powers, manifesting as unexpected accidents. In this article, I explore how the planned expansion evokes this contested site as more than a singular mountain, and how divergent epistemic formations interrupt the making of extractive resources in multiple ways.

In the spring of 1826, the young Danish naval officer Carl Irminger and two of his friends sailed with a cargo ship from Copenhagen to Iceland to stay there during the summer. This article is based on Irminger’s unpublished travel diary. Irminger and his friends blended in with the local elite, which provided them with equipment and contacts to travel. Their journeys out from Reykjavik were adventurous and depended on local guides and the hospitality of residents along the way. The tales of hardships during the travels, combined with contacts established during the trip, became important credentials in Irminger’s future career. He was hired as an adjutant to the Danish prince, and the narrative of his summer in Iceland ignited a royal expedition there in 1834, of which Irminger was to be the trip leader. Irminger’s diary reflects a broader shift from Enlightenment exploration reporting into Romantic travel writing, with more emotional and aesthetic emphasis. His journey was a forerunner of the nature tourism that eventually was to sprout in Iceland.

Arctic mining has a bad reputation because the extractive industry is often responsible for a suite of environmental problems. Yet, few studies explore the gap between untouched tundra and messy megaproject from a historical perspective. Our paper focuses on Advent City as a case study of the emergence of coal mining in Svalbard (Norway) coupled with the onset of mining-related environmental change. After short but intensive human activity (1904–1908), the ecosystem had a century to respond, and we observe a lasting impact on the flora in particular. With interdisciplinary contributions from historical archaeology, archaeozoology, archaeobotany and botany, supplemented by stable isotope analysis, we examine 1) which human activities initially asserted pressure on the Arctic environment, 2) whether the miners at Advent City were “eco-conscious,” for example whether they showed concern for the environment and 3) how the local ecosystem reacted after mine closure and site abandonment. Among the remains of typical mining infrastructure, we prioritised localities that revealed the subtleties of long-term anthropogenic impact. Significant pressure resulted from landscape modifications, the import of non-native animals and plants, hunting and fowling, and the indiscriminate disposal of waste material. Where it was possible to identify individual inhabitants, these shared an economic attitude of waste not, want not, but they did not hold the environment in high regard. Ground clearances, animal dung and waste dumps continue to have an effect after a hundred years. The anthropogenic interference with the fell field led to habitat creation, especially for vascular plants. The vegetation cover and biodiversity were high, but we recorded no exotic or threatened plant species. Impacted localities generally showed a reduction of the natural patchiness of plant communities, and highly eutrophic conditions were unsuitable for liverworts and lichens. Supplementary isotopic analysis of animal bones added data to the marine reservoir offset in Svalbard underlining the far-reaching potential of our multi-proxy approach. We conclude that although damaging human–environment interactions formerly took place at Advent City, these were limited and primarily left the visual impact of the ruins. The fell field is such a dynamic area that the subtle anthropogenic effects on the local tundra may soon be lost. The fauna and flora may not recover to what they were before the miners arrived, but they will continue to respond to new post-industrial circumstances.

While the Antarctic Treaty System intended to keep Antarctica an area of international cooperation and science free from militarisation and international conflict, the region has not been completely shielded from global power transitions, such as decolonisation and the end of the Cold War. Presently, emerging countries from Asia are increasingly willing to invest in polar infrastructure and science on the back of their growing influence in world politics. South Korea has also invested heavily in its Antarctic infrastructure and capabilities recently and has been identified as an actor with economic and political interests that are potentially challenging for the existing Antarctic order. This article first assesses the extent and performance of the growing bilateral cooperation between South Korea and one of its closest partners, New Zealand, a country with strong vested interests in the status quo order. How did the cooperation develop between these two actors with ostensibly diverging interests? This article finds that what may have been a friction–laden relationship, actually developed into a win-win partnership for both countries. The article then moves on to offer an explanation for how this productive relationship was made possible by utilising a mutual socialisation approach that explores socio-structural processes around status accommodation.

This article concentrates on the interconnected past, present and future of telecommunications and the environment in the Arctic. It brings together discussions on the natural environment, sustainable development and connectivity in and through the Arctic and focuses on fixed-line infrastructure. This study builds on the theoretical literature on infrastructure, infrastructuring and pipeline ecologies and demonstrates how the peculiar features of the Arctic, such as coldness, snow and ice, ground frost and permafrost affect telecommunication lines, and how this infrastructure impacts the environment in which it is built. Similarly, the environmental conditions, paired with long distances, small populations and limited economic opportunities, affect the infrastructuring processes and the selection of technologies, as well as their spatial extent, quality and the speed of their expansion. While the construction of telecommunication lines supports the exploitation of natural resources in and beyond the different parts of the circumpolar North, it also plays a role in the observation and protection of the Arctic.

The Arctic Contaminants Action Programme (ACAP), originally intended to follow up the work of AMAP (the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme) on identifying the sources of pollution, became an official working group under the Arctic Council in 2006. ACAP has focussed on pollution from Russian sources, the main objective being to accelerate the reduction of national emissions of various environmental pollutants and climate forcers. Basically, ACAP initiates projects with a scientific basis in AMAP assessments of the health of the Arctic. The idea behind the creation of ACAP was to channel the work of the Arctic Council in a more practical direction and to improve the use of the knowledge produced by AMAP. ACAP is one of only two Council working groups not to have been specifically evaluated and analysed by external bodies and academics. This article undertakes a critical analysis of ACAP and argues that there are great potentials for improving its work. ACAP has established a forum where it has been possible to facilitate pilot projects aimed at limiting harmful emissions; this work should be strengthened.

The Khibiny Educational and Scientific Station (KESS) of the Faculty of Geography, M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU), was founded in 1948. It is one of the oldest stations of the MSU Faculty of Geography and the only one located north of the Arctic Circle. It is also one of the oldest continuously operating arctic field stations in the world. For more than 70 years, the research station has fostered scientific and international collaboration. Science and education carried out at the station have always gone hand in hand and the research results have been both theoretical and practical. Many generations of Russian geographers owe their successful careers to the research activities at the Khibiny station. Nowadays, it is one of the two major student training bases for the Faculty of Geography as well as a focal point of many national and international research projects, including the International Network for Terrestrial Research and Monitoring in the Arctic (INTERACT) network.

On the continental shelf of the Antarctic the major disturbance to benthic ecosystems is from iceberg scouring; however, this is based on observations from the Peninsula region. We combine observation and experimentation in the McMurdo Sound region of the Ross Sea to determine if community recovery patterns there are similar to those in better-studied Antarctic regions, and if local immigration is an important factor in recovery dynamics. We found that regardless of habitat differences in depth, substrate, and oceanographic setting, iceberg disturbance strongly impacted benthic communities in McMurdo Sound. Notably, in shallow water (<30 m) where anchor ice is an annual disturbance, both the benthic communities and recovery processes were more variable than at deeper locations. A manipulative experiment performed in a shallow area indicated that recruitment might be more important than immigration to infaunal community recovery. We conclude that whilst disturbance frequency influences dominant epifauna, recovery from iceberg disturbance is a slow ecological progression that is dependent on the extremely inconsistent recruitment processes of the high Antarctic benthic ecosystem.

The distribution, density and percentage contribution of pack ice seals during ship-board censuses in the marginal sea ice zone beyond the Lazarev Sea in spring 2019 are presented. Adult/juvenile crabeater seals (n = 19), leopard seals (n = 3) and Ross seals (n = 10) were sighted during 582.2 nm of censuses along the ship’s track line in the area bounded by 00°00’–22°E and 56°–60°S. Antarctic fur seals (n = 21) were only encountered on the outer fringes of the pack ice, and Weddell seals were absent due to their primary use of fast ice and inner pack ice habitats close to the coast. Crabeater seal sightings included juveniles (n = 2) and another four groups of 2–3 unclassified crabeater seals, singletons (n = 5), single mothers with pups (n = 3) and a family group (n = 1 triad). Only one leopard seal attended a pup, while no Ross seal pups were located. The survey was likely of insufficient effort, in both extent (north of 60°S) and duration (18 days), to locate seals in considerable numbers this early (late October/early November) in their austral spring breeding season.

Physical scientists, social scientists, humanities scholars, and journalists have all framed Antarctica as a place of global importance—as a laboratory for scientific research, as a strategic site for geopolitical agendas, and more recently as a source of melting ice that could catastrophically inundate populations worldwide. Yet, the changing cryosphere impacts society within Antarctica as well, and this article expands the focus of Antarctic ice research to include human activities on and around the continent. It reframes Antarctica as a place with human history and local activities that are being affected by melting ice, even if the consequences are much smaller in scale than the effects of global sea level rise. Specifically focused on tourism and conservation along the west Antarctica Peninsula (wAP), this article demonstrates the impacts of changing glaciers and sea ice on the timing, location, and type of tourism as well as the ability of changing ice to mediate human experiences through conservation agendas. As future ice conditions influence Antarctic tourism and conservation, an attention to issues emerging within the wAP region offers a new perspective on climate change impacts and the management of Antarctic activities in the 21st-century Anthropocene.

The 1845 British polar expedition in search of a northwest passage through the Canadian Arctic under the command of Sir John Franklin resulted in the greatest loss of life event in the history of polar exploration. The names of the 129 officers and crew who sailed and died on the catastrophic voyage are known, but the identification of their skeletons found scattered along the route of their attempted escape is problematic. Here, we report DNA analyses from skeletal remains from King William Island, where the majority of the expedition fatalities occurred, and from a paternal descendant of a member of the expedition. A match was found between an archaeological sample and a presumed descendant sample using Y-chromosome haplotyping. We conclude that DNA and genealogical evidence confirm the identity of the remains as those of Warrant Officer John Gregory, Engineer, HMS Erebus. This is the first member of the 1845 Franklin expedition whose identity has been confirmed through DNA and genealogical analyses.

Members of the First German South Polar Expedition (1901–1903) encountered emperor penguins (Aptenodytes forsteri) near their wintering station in the sea ice of Posadowsky Bay, East Antarctica. The penguins appeared to be generally less of scientific interest, but more of a useful resource. Despite the presence of chicks, the men were uncertain about the existence of a breeding colony, and did not record the position of the penguin aggregation they encountered. In later years, only a few sightings confirmed the existence of a colony, and the last ground visit took place in 1960. Based on satellite imagery, a colony appears to exist even now. This paper examines what impact the expedition may have had on this colony, and whether it still exists.

The use of Spratt’s dog cakes is well documented in the diaries and reminiscences of many early Antarctic expedition members. Commercially produced dog food was promoted by the likes of Spratt’s as an advanced form of animal nutrition and would have been of interest to expedition planners who were already concerned with the nutritional requirements of expedition members. An approximately 100-year-old dog cake recovered from Antarctica was compared by chemical analysis and spectroscopic methods with a series of model dog cakes and a commercial dog biscuit to determine the composition and calorific content. The presence of bone fragments within the dog cake was confirmed, whereas starch in the bulk matrix of the sample was consistent with being a mixture of wheat and oat flour, while only minimal fat or oil was present. Calorific content, while insufficient compared to a modern feed for high-performance dogs, would nonetheless have been a valuable addition to the use of dried or frozen whole meat such as seal, fish, or pemmican and contributed additional energy compared to meat alone.