The Geographer: The Poles (Winter 2011)

The

Geographer Winter 2011 -12

The newsletter of the

Royal Scottish Geographical Society

66 degrees and climbing...

In This Edition...

past and present polar perspectives

•E xpert Views: The Scots before Scott •E xpert Views: Permafrost, Pesticides & Predicting Ice Sheets •O pinion: Alexander Kellas - Himalayan Hero •O pinions: Polar Bears, Polar Pairs & the Northern Lights •C ountry in Focus: Greenland from the Inside •R eader Offer: Mapping the Railways

“The Arctic is considered the health barometer for the planet. If you wish to see how healthy the planet is, come and take its pulse in the Arctic.”

plus other news, comments, books...

Sheila Watt-Cloutier, Inuit Representative

RSGS: helping to make the connections between people, places & the planet

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hen I took on my role in 2006, I knew that the RSGS was one of Scotland’s oldest and finest charities; however, what I did not know was the period of breathtaking and unavoidable change that lay ahead.

We needed to reach out and promote ourselves better, to modernise and refresh our image, to encourage more members and wider audiences, and to strengthen our core charitable role of education. At the same time, we needed to build a new home for ourselves, to fundamentally change our structure, and to make our finances less precarious. At that time, the Society’s future was looking somewhat uncertain.

Now, near the end of my presidential term, it is deeply satisfying to see how much has been achieved. The Fair Maid’s House and HQ are a wonderful base; The Geographer and the talks programme are providing impressive and professional outreach; the literature, networks and media activity are developing a positive profile. It is testament to the vision, hard work and professionalism of our new team of staff that so much has been achieved so quickly. Much credit must also go to the Board for the time and support that they have committed. I wish to thank all of the staff and the Board, and also all of you who have helped towards our successes.

Whilst our Chief Executive will be the first to remind me of the amount that remains to be done, and the undoubted difficulties of the current economic landscape, I nonetheless genuinely believe that the RSGS now has a momentum, direction and confidence that will serve it well as we go forwards. I am therefore proud to be handing over the reins at this exciting time, with solid foundations in place and high hopes for the future.

It has been an honour to serve as your President, and I much look forward as a Vice-President to supporting the Society and my successor in the years ahead.

Lord Jamie Lindsay President RSGS, Lord John Murray House, 15-19 North Port, Perth, PH1 5LU tel: 01738 455050 email: enquiries@rsgs.org www.rsgs.org Charity registered in Scotland no SC015599 The views expressed in this newsletter are not necessarily those of the RSGS. Cover image: Melting pack ice near Cornwallis Island. © John Beatty Masthead image: Disko Bay, Greenland. © Ivars Sills

polar perspectives

66 degrees and climbing...

Mike Robinson, Chief Executive This winter sees the centenary of Amundsen’s and Scott’s attempts to be the first to reach the South Pole. Amundsen’s team arrived on 14th December 1911, Scott’s a month later on 17th January 1912; both incredible feats of endurance and courage for which, so famously, Scott and his team paid the ultimate sacrifice in March of that year, as their return journey proved too much.

Both Amundsen and Scott, and so many of the other leading lights of polar exploration, were medallists of the Society in its earlier years, and much of our collection reflects this era, when so much of the world’s attention was focused on the North and South Poles. The names of many early RSGS scientists and members appear on the map – as bays or headlands, hills or glaciers – perhaps most notably Coats, Beardmore, Geikie, and the Scotia expedition itself which lent its name to a tectonic plate below the Southern Ocean.

It was not just about the South Pole either. Robert Peary, another RSGS medallist, had only months before claimed the North Pole, which is why Amundsen switched his efforts southwards. But it wasn’t all adventure. It was William Speirs Bruce who led the most thorough scientific expedition of that era, and in a quiet way it is perhaps his legacy that has the greatest resonance today.

A hundred years on, the poles are once again the focus of a good deal of the world’s attention, not least through the BBC’s acclaimed Frozen Planet series. A great number of geographers and other scientists from Scottish universities are working within the Arctic and Antarctic circles (which start at 66 degrees 32 minutes both north and south). The focus is no longer about trying to ‘conquer’ the poles, but rather Emperor penguins and chicks in creche sheltering in the lee of the Ross Sea Ice Shelf, Antarctica. © BBC/Jeff Wilson (Frozen Planet series) about trying to understand them. To understand how they used to be. To understand how they are changing. And to understand how they impact on the balance of nature and the rest of the world.

On the centenary of these remarkable expeditions, the polar regions have become less about the challenge or idle curiosity, and more about scientific concern and personal vested interest.

RSGS: helping to make the connections between people, places & the planet

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NEWS People • Places • Planet We are delighted that HRH The Princess Royal, Vice-President of the RSGS, has kindly agreed to present the 2011 RSGS University Medals, awarded to the outstanding honours geography graduates in each of the Scottish universities. Her Royal Highness will present the awards in Perth Concert Hall on 17th January 2012, after the RSGS talk which will be given by science writer Fred Pearce at 7.30pm.

We hope that many RSGS members and others will be able to come along and support this event, one of the ways in which we hope to encourage the young geographers of the future. If you 17th would like to enjoy a meal before the talk, you may wish January to book into one of these popular local restaurants, all within a few hundred yards of the Concert Hall: The Bothy (01738 449792); The North Port (01738 580867); Paco’s (01738 622290).

Pine Island Glacier The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) is surveying Western Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier, the largest in the world, to understand how ice is being lost and its likely contribution to future sea-level rise. In early December, a team of four left their research station on the Antarctic Peninsula, to spend 12 weeks living in tents on their remote field site over 800 miles away.

BAS glaciologist Dr Andy Smith, leading the mission, said, “Loss of ice from Pine Island Glacier could be a major contributor to global sea level rise in the future. What we are trying to determine is what

The scientific techniques used to study glaciers were filmed by the Frozen Planet team for episode 7, On Thin Ice. Dr Smith flew with the Frozen Planet team up the Antarctic Peninsula in January 2010, to witness the disintegrating of part of the Wilkins Ice Shelf and to film its dramatic break up. The crew captured footage of giant icebergs, some over a mile in diameter. Smith says, “Now that’s remarkable – the edge of the ice shelf has disintegrated. It’s almost like a slow-motion explosion.”

Smith and the crew landed on part of an ice bridge to erect a satellite transmitter to record the processes involved when the remainder of the ice-shelf collapses.

NASA’s Operation IceBridge is the largest airborne campaign ever to study the dynamics of Earth’s polar regions. The six-year survey began in 2009, using remotesensing instruments on planes to map Arctic and Antarctic areas once each year. In November 2011, two dozen flights took off across Antarctica from an operations base in Chile.

Ice covers 98% of Antarctica. Scientists are concerned about how quickly key features are thinning, such as Pine Island Glacier, which rests on bedrock below sea level.

“With a third year of data-gathering underway, we are starting to build our own record of change,” said Michael Studinger, IceBridge project scientist at NASA. “With IceBridge, our aim is to understand what the world’s major ice sheets could contribute to sea-level rise. To understand that, you have to record how ice sheets and glaciers are changing over time.”

Several flight lines went over sea ice near the Antarctic Peninsula, to help scientists understand why sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere is not following the steady decline of sea ice thickness and extent seen in the Arctic. Other flight lines followed ground traverses being made, during which NASA scientists are travelling different sections of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, measuring snowfall accumulation and the characteristics of Pine Island Glacier.

See www.nasa.gov/icebridge and www.espo.nasa.gov/oib for more information about Operation IceBridge.

Beneath the Frozen Continent Scientists at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) have produced the most detailed map yet of what lies underneath Antarctica - its rock bed.

BEDMAP is a close-up view of the landscape beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet, and incorporates decades of survey data acquired by planes, satellites, ships, and even researchers on dog-drawn sleds.

Dr Hamish Pritchard from BAS presented the new imagery in December to the 2011 American Geophysical Union Meeting, the world’s largest annual gathering of Earth and planetary scientists.

SAGT News In October, at its annual conference, the Scottish Association of Geography Teachers was presented with the RSGS’s 2011 Tivy Education Medal, in recognition of SAGT’s exemplary, outstanding and inspirational contributions to teaching, education policy and other work, and in celebration of the organisation’s 40th anniversary.

The RSGS’s playground map was the subject of a workshop at the conference, provoking an interesting discussion about ways in which the map can be used to engage schoolchildren more directly with geographical issues.

Source: BEDMAP Consortium/BAS

polar perspectives

Pine Island Glacier is of great interest to scientists worldwide as it has been thinning at a rate of more than one metre per year, and its flow rate has accelerated over the past 15 years. It is known as the ‘weak underbelly’ of the Antarctic because a relatively small ice shelf is holding back ice in a huge basin, keeping it from flowing into the ocean.

this contribution is likely to be and over what timescale.” The team is using various techniques, including GPS and seismic measurements, to map the conditions beneath the ice and improve understanding of what allows this massive river of ice to flow at more than two miles per year.

Operation IceBridge

polar perspectives

HRH The Princess Royal to Present University Medals

NEWS People • Places • Planet Inspiring People The second half of the 2011-12 RSGS talks season offers some tremendous speakers, including longdistance swimmer Lewis Gordon Pugh, outstanding mountaineer Stephen Venables, acclaimed wildlife artist Chris Rose, highly-respected science writer Fred Pearce, and fascinating travel writer Patrick Richardson.

We are grateful to have received further sponsorship support for the talks programme from BEAR Scotland.

Although, through careful negotiation, we are able to deliver a programme of talks that is worth significantly more than we pay for it, the talks still represent a substantial proportion of the Society’s costs, and the support of corporate sponsors is very much appreciated.

If you have a suggestion for a speaker for the 201213 programme of talks, or if your organisation would be interested in sponsoring one of the talks, please contact RSGS HQ on enquiries@rsgs.org or 01738 455050.

polar perspectives

RSGS Polar Collection In October, the RSGS hosted an evening reception to celebrate the generous gift by the family of the late Commander Angus Erskine FRSGS of his extensive polar collection. This is now combined with the generous gift by the Scottish Arctic Club (SAC) of their library, and with the RSGS’s own polar materials, to create a collection containing over 2,000 books amongst other material. Members of the Erskine family and officials of the SAC attended the reception, which concluded with a grand tour of the new Fair Maid’s House.

As the 2011 UN Climate Change Conference drew to a close, with the main outcome seeming to be an agreement to have an agreement by 2015, we received a letter from a non-governmental organisation representative attending the event. Lexi Barnett works for SCIAF and represented Stop Climate Chaos Scotland while in Durban.

Letter from Durban 8th December 2011 We’re heading into the final 24 hours of the climate talks in Durban, and so far we’ve seen a lot of very technical discussion, and not a lot of finalised agreements. The three major issues still on the table are: 1. t he Kyoto Protocol (KP) second commitment period; 2. a n additional agreement to ensure those countries who won’t sign up to, or aren’t part of, a second commitment period are reducing their emissions; and 3. t he path forward to fill the Green Climate Fund – the urgently needed financing to help developing countries adapt to climate change and provide support for green development.

And with talks predicted to go on till the early hours of Saturday morning, we’re reaching crunch time.

There have been some positive developments today in terms of the EU working with the African states and small island states, putting forward ambitious proposals for a global treaty that includes those countries who won’t accept or aren’t part of the KP. We also heard that Germany and Denmark have begun the ball rolling on getting money into the Green Climate Fund, which is crucial. We need to see plans to ensure that the $100 billion/year by 2020 that’s been pledged is flowing into the pot.

In terms of the Kyoto Protocol, the good news is that the US is signalling a shift in position. Talk from earlier this week about delaying a global deal until 2020 is being overtaken by calls to ensure that the fair, ambitious and binding global deal on climate change is agreed and ready to go by 2015, and that decisions need to be taken in Durban to get that process on track.

We cannot afford any more inaction or delay. The decisions needed in the next 24 hours from Durban are the building blocks to ensure that the world is ready to get the deal and start the work.

I heard a South African bishop address the plenary this morning, asking the delegates if they will ransom our children’s futures to those who are trying to delay agreement. It’s a good question. But it is not only our children’s futures, it is the lives of people across Africa, Asia and Latin America who are paying a high price for climate inaction. With a full day of negotiations to go, anything could happen.

Lexi

Donations for staff post and computers

Lord Lindsay, RSGS President, with Alec Erskine, elder son of the late Commander Erskine, and Peter Mackay, SAC librarian.

We have been very fortunate to receive generous donations from two members this quarter: one allowed us to recruit a new communications officer on a one-year contract; the other paid towards a much-needed upgrade of the computers at HQ. Both donors have requested to remain anonymous, but thank you to both for their invaluable support.

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NEWS People • Places • Planet

In October, an enthusiastic audience had the opportunity to hear about BBC Scotland’s extensive new series of programmes around the theme of explorers. Neil Oliver talked about his series, which included an episode focused on the RSGS-funded Scotia expedition and its leader William Speirs Bruce. And adventurer Mark Beaumont spoke of his recent experience when he joined leading Scottish explorer Jock Wishart’s expedition to row to the Magnetic North Pole.

In November, with the University of Edinburgh, we welcomed British astronaut Piers Sellers for an entertaining afternoon’s talk about his three trips aboard the space shuttles. We are hopeful that he will agree to speak for us again in the near future.

Staff Changes In October, we were delighted to welcome two new members of staff to RSGS HQ.

Council until June 2012, to help develop the Society’s educational activities, particularly with schools.

Pam Henderson is our new part-time finance officer, responsible for the Society’s financial administration and reporting. Dr Joyce Gilbert is our new education officer, kindly offered on secondment from Perth & Kinross

However, we were sorry when our communications officer, Kirsten Smith, who was responsible for organising much of the 2011-12 talks programme, left the Society in November to follow a new career in Edinburgh; we wish her very well.

polar perspectives

W S Bruce Medal The 2010 W S Bruce Medal, awarded jointly by the RSGS and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, was presented in October to Alison Cook, at an event in Stirling. Alison joined the British Antarctic Survey in 2000, and now works there as a Geographic Data Analyst in the mapping team. Her work has included mapping changes in glaciers, compiling topographic maps for other polar research scientists, and undertaking fieldwork and using geographic data in various forms to improve our understanding of Antarctica’s icy rugged landscape. Her science has included the impact that glacier retreat is having on the surrounding environment, and the significance of changes in this climate-warming hot-spot.

Dunfermline Group Visit In November, 17 RSGS Dunfermline group members enjoyed an outing to the Fair Maid’s House, where they were given a guided tour by the Society’s Chairman and Vice Chairman. Margaret Wilkes showed a map of Fife for the 1964 Land Use Survey of Great Britain, coloured in by pupils from Dunfermline High School and made possible thanks to financial assistance from RSGS Dunfermline; Margaret would like anyone involved in this to contact her c/o RSGS HQ. And the conclusion from Dunfermline: “a visit is highly recommended”. If other RSGS groups are interested in visiting the Fair Maid’s House when it is closed to the public, please contact Fiona Parker at HQ to enquire whether a visit can be arranged.

World War II Arctic Medal Campaign MP Caroline Dinenage called on the Government in December to honour the veterans of the WWII Arctic Convoys, in support of a long running campaign by a number of bodies, including the Scottish Russian Convoy Club, to gain them a medal.

Between 1941 and 1945, around 66,500 men braved the dangerous and freezing conditions of the Arctic Circle, with temperatures as low as -60°C, to keep the supply lines open to Murmansk and Archangel. The seamen endured what Winston Churchill described as “the worst journey in the world”, and were under constant attack from air and sea. Their efforts helped turn the fate of the war by preventing the Soviet Union from starving and collapsing against the German onslaught on the eastern front. Despite being hailed as heroes in Russia, the veterans of the Arctic Convoys have not been honoured by the UK. Caroline said, “With only 200 of the tens of thousands of veterans still alive to receive this honour, time is of the essence.”

Continuing Geography The RSGS has produced a new leaflet that encourages people to consider leaving a donation to the charity in their Will. Legacies are a vital source of income ing to Make the Conn forHelp the RSGS – we not to ectiocould ns Mak ing aafford Real Difference “There has never been a operatemore without legacy donations, which critical time for people to understand the Earth, its have allowed to continue, to landscapes andthe our role Society in it.

Geography The RSGS is helping to make the connections between people,grow, places develop and to even through lean and the planet.”

Leaving a Legacy for the RSGS times.

Professor Iain Stewart

We understand that, in your Will, you will wish to prioritise the interests of your family and friends.

However, we hope you might also consider includin ga legacy for the Royal Scottish Geographical Society.

To include the RSGS in your Will: • decide which Fund you wish to support (Genera l, Talks, Education, Collecti ons or Grants); • decide which type of legacy you wish to leave (pecuniary, specific or residuar y); • contact your solicito r or other legal advisor; • pass on our full details (The Royal Scottish Geographical Society, 15-19 North Port, Perth, PH1 5LU, Scottish Charity No SC015599).

Legacies remain one of the most important ways of supporting the Royal Scottish Geographical Society’s work. Indeed, many of our achievements over the past century and more have only been possible because of money received from RSGS supporters in their Wills, or in memory of loved ones.

The Livingstone Medal, for instance, was endowe d in 1901 by Dr David Livingst one’s family in his honour.

And legacy gifts from member s have often kept the Society going through lean times, allowing it to continue, to develop and to grow.

More recently, the RSGS has received several bequest s of valuable maps, books and images, sometimes with the money required to manage them; for example , an extensive collection of beautiful old maps, and a residuary legacy which allowed us to conserve the gifted maps and helped make possible the move to Perth.

We can all make a positive difference, large or small, in the world we leave behind.

You can help us continu e to inspire generations to come.

The leaflet also introduces five new funds, established so that legacies, donations and grants from individuals and organisations can be directed towards Please consider helping the RSGS into the by writing a bequeswork: particular areas of thefuture Society’s t into your Will.

Please help

The Royal Scottish Geograp hical Society, 15-19 North Port, Perth, PH1 5LU t: 01738 455050 e: enquiries@rsgs.org w: www.rsgs.org

us to inspire generations come.

General Fund – toExploring Geography: to natural ecosystems confli ct & peace support the overall costs of running the rocks & miner als identity & security economics & inequality waste & pollution earthquakes & volcanoes biodiversity maps nameof Geograph directed s Society, to the& place area greatest health & droug y is... mountains & river system ht & flooding climate chang s well-being urban e planning wealth cultur e & heritage coasta & poverty current need; l erosion bus & train servic weather continents & communities & neighbourhoods

countryside & natural

Scottish Charity No SC015599

features localisa tion & globalisation

countries patterns property ownership GPS & SatNav ...how we make oceans & ocea sense of the world.sustainability es

Royal Scottish Geographic

al n currentsInspiring Talks Fund – landscape restoration People: to Society energy & resour ces nationa l boundaries support the costs of running the RSGS’s illustrated talks and public events;

RSGS LEGACY 6.indd

Printed by Robertson Printers. 7-9 Queen Street, Forfar DD8 3AJ on 120gsm Ability Offset, FSC certified.

In the autumn, RSGS successfully co-hosted two talks in Edinburgh; thank you to those members who attended.

polar perspectives

Excellent Extra Events

Continuing Exploring Geography Inspiring People

Developing Citizenship Conserving Heritage Promoting Science “Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.”

Robert Louis Stevenson

1

Education Fund – Developing Citizenship: to support the costs of developing and running RSGS projects, and promoting geography, in schools; Collections Fund – Conserving Heritage: to support the costs of conserving items in the RSGS collection, and making them publicly accessible; Grants Fund – Promoting Science: to support the costs of awarding RSGS research and expedition grants.

If you are able to support us, and would like to let us know of your pledge, or you would like to speak to someone about leaving a legacy, please contact us on 01738 455050.

Royal Scottish Geographical Society 15/11/2011 12:24

NEWS People • Places • Planet Desert Whales

The researchers are trying to establish the fossils’ age (perhaps around seven million years), to work out why the site contains so many whales, to determine how they died, and to understand the geological environment in which their remains were preserved. The team is working to document the fossils while still in the ground, using scanners to take images from which three-dimensional digital models, and hopefully then museum replicas of the skeletons, can be constructed.

Image courtesy of Felipe Infante/Chilean National Museum of Natural History.

Jean Forbes FRSGS Jean Forbes, a geographer and pioneer of environmental education, died in August aged 76.

Initially a human geographer, Jean moved increasingly into urban and regional planning, involving herself in research into the relationship between population changes and land use needs, with new approaches that considered social and economic alongside physical elements. At Glasgow and Strathclyde universities, she was an enthusiastic and supportive teacher of planning students, who valued her creative and forward-looking approach.

Jean was a founder-member of the Scottish Environmental Education Council, devised a new degree of Master of Environmental Studies which operated across traditional departmental boundaries and brought together a wide range of expertise and research in environmental issues, and was founder and first director of Strathclyde University’s Graduate School of Environmental Studies (GSES).

Her conviction was that if you were going to do something you must do it properly; as she took up successive new challenges, she put in the extra effort to acquire additional qualifications. Reflecting her lifetime commitment to personal and community involvement, she took on various roles after her retirement, when she returned home to Northern Ireland.

In recognition of her career achievements, she was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society in 1993.

It has been a steep learning curve for the Society since we opened the doors of our new visitor centre.

We have welcomed more than 1,500 visitors in total, and have received around £620 in donations, but even with our team of 30 volunteers, we were unable to sufficiently man the centre to open on three of the planned days.

The volunteers came together in December to share their observations, and to make recommendations for the coming season, and their thoughts will help inform our plans for 2012. We are extremely grateful for their time and continuing assistance. We hope that more local people will come forward over the next few months, who are prepared to cover a 3-4 hour slot, so that we can open for more of the week and support the various requests for tours and visits.

If you are able to help by volunteering in the Fair Maid’s House in the coming year, then please get in touch with Fiona at HQ.

Frozen Planet With the outstanding photography for which the BBC Natural History Unit has become renowned, it was little surprise that the BBC’s Frozen Planet series enjoyed viewing figures of more than seven million, making it one of the most-watched programmes in recent months.

The series was co-produced with the Open University, which has launched a new short course, The Frozen Planet, focusing more on the science behind the series, and how ice shapes and controls our planet. See www.open.ac.uk/openlearn/frozenplanet for details, and to access additional materials, including an attractive colour poster, an interactive map of the polar regions, and a free online course.

Filmed with a bespoke, ‘winterised’ hi-speed camera, an emperor penguin leaps out onto the ice. These remarkable birds return to Antarctica just as all other life is deserting it, and are the only birds to stay during the coldest winter on Earth. © BBC

A Whole Lot of Bottle In 2010, the crew of the Plastiki (inspired by the famous Kon-Tiki voyage) sailed more than 8,000 nautical miles across the Pacific in a boat made of 12,500 plastic drinks bottles, to highlight the shocking and unnecessary impact of discarded single-use plastics on the health of our oceans. In November 2011, Jo Royle, the vessel’s skipper, came to Aberdeen to talk about this amazing voyage and to accept the RSGS’s Geddes Environment Medal, awarded to the crew for their original and inspiring adventure to highlight the issue of marine pollution, recognised by the Society as an outstanding contribution to conservation of the natural environment and the development of sustainability.

polar perspectives

In Chile’s Atacama Desert, the driest in the world, a team of researchers from institutions in Chile, Brazil and the United States has been examining more than 80 exquisitely preserved whale fossils, in what may be one of the largest and most diverse palaeontological troves of its kind. The finds, in a site about 20m by 240m, were originally uncovered in 2010 by a construction company working on a new road, and include adult and juvenile baleen whales, a walrus-whale, and an extinct species of sperm whale.

The Fair Maid’s House

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NEWS People • Places • Planet Alistair Cruickshank Alistair B Cruickshank was born in Moat Brae, Dumfries on 3rd August 1931. Moat Brae was reputed to be the house in which JM Barrie first thought of the story of Peter Pan. If that is so, some of the timelessness of this must have passed on to Alistair, for he retained an appetite for challenges throughout his life.

Alistair was schooled in Stirling, where he gave the earliest indications of his academic abilities. He went to the University of Glasgow, where he gained an honours MA degree in Geography and Economics, and the student medal from RSGS. He was awarded a Rotary post-graduate scholarship, which took him to Georgia in the USA. This was the beginning of a life-long and profound interest in America.

Over the next few years, he completed teacher training at Jordanhill College, undertook his National Service with the RAF, and got his first job in Derby. In 1957, he married Sheena. They had three children: Ian, Gillean and Fraser. Over more than 50 years, his family remained central to his life. He was justifiably proud of all their achievements,

but none more so than Sheena’s appointment as Lord Lieutenant of Clackmannanshire.

supporter of RSGS centres, and his travels throughout Scotland made him many new friends.

Though he greatly enjoyed the USA, he loved Scotland – its towns and cities, but most of all its countryside. He liked nothing more than to be with his family in the hills and glens.

Alistair was appointed to a lectureship in the University of Glasgow Extra-mural Department in Dumfries. In 1966, he was invited to work in the Department of Geography in the main Gilmorehill campus, where he stayed for nearly 20 years. His academic interests in social geography and in the USA blossomed, the latter bolstered by further extended visits to Ohio and later to Arizona. He played a major part in the changes that took place in Glasgow over this period. His greatest interest was in undergraduate students, and he was a highly regarded teacher. These interests extended to schools, and he became chief examiner for the Certificate of Sixth Year Studies in Geography, the forerunner for today’s Advanced Higher.

In 1995, he moved to his third vocation, that of a minister in the Church of Scotland. He had taken classes in divinity whilst at Glasgow, and now was ordained as an auxiliary minister in the Church.

He spent an extended period acting as a locum in New Jersey in the USA. In Scotland he was minister in Dunblane, Doune, Stirling and Coll. The understanding of and care for others, that had been manifest in his earlier life, made him a valued member of the communities he served.

In 1985, he became Director of the RSGS. He initiated the changes and developments that eventually led to the new headquarters in Perth. He visited these shortly before his death, and was moved and delighted by what he saw.

The Perth HQ is a fitting tribute to his vision. He was a passionate

Alistair was a big man in all ways.

His insight into people and his wish to serve were great strengths.

His infectious grin and boundless enthusiasm made him easy to like.

The Royal Scottish Geographical Society was fortunate in having his leadership at a crucial time in its history.

NASA has produced a new global map of the salinity of Earth’s ocean surface. The map shows predominantly well-known features, such as higher salinity in the subtropics, higher average salinity in the Atlantic compared to the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and lower salinity in rainy belts near the equator and elsewhere. These features are related to large-scale patterns of rainfall and evaporation over the ocean, river © NASA/GSFC/JPL-Caltech outflow and ocean circulation. Other important regional features are clearly evident, and the map also shows important smaller details, such as a larger-than-expected extent of low-salinity water associated with outflow from the Amazon River.

The map uses early data received from the Aquarius/SAC-D observatory, a collaboration between NASA and Argentina’s space agency, CONAE. Launched in June 2011, Aquarius is making the first space observations of ocean surface salinity variations, a key component of Earth’s climate, linked to the cycling of freshwater around our planet and influencing ocean circulation.

The map is an early draft, and months of additional calibration and data validation work remain to be done, to iron out uncertainties and errors. Meanwhile, Aquarius will continue to monitor how features change over time and study their link to climate and weather variations.

See www.nasa.gov/aquarius for more information.

Plan for Polar Bears In November, Canada’s environment ministry declared the polar bear to be a “species of special concern”. The decision means that a management plan to protect the species must be produced within three years. Around twothirds of the world’s polar bears live in Canada.

The Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental campaign group based in Tucson, Arizona, complained that the bear should have been listed as ‘threatened’ or ‘endangered’, which would have prohibited some types of hunting and established a protected ‘critical habitat’.

polar perspectives

New Map of Ocean Salinity

We regret to announce that Alistair Cruikshank, former Director of the RSGS, passed away on 15th October 2011.

This appreciation is by Dr Gordon Dickinson, University of Glasgow.

Expert View: Polar Perspective

Continuing the Frozen Planet Journey Liezel Tipper, Communications Unit, The Open University

Frozen Planet is an Open University and BBC co-production.

Frozen Planet took viewers on the ultimate polar expedition through the frozen wilderness of the Arctic and Antarctica. It showcased the fragile, jaw-dropping beauty and majestic power of the elements in the greatest wilderness on Earth.

Dr Mark Brandon, Polar Oceanographer from the Open University, and Academic Consultant for the series, researched the polar regions over many years, and was on location with the Frozen Planet production team. He said, “Ice has really shaped our landscapes, and it controls how and where humans and animals live. The Arctic has been inhabited for nearly 30,000 years, and tribes there have developed a unique ability to survive with only snow, ice, animal skins and bones to create shelters, weapons and transportation. Animals like whales, walrus, penguins and polar bears, however, prosper in these ecological niches created by the polar environments.”

King penguins on South Georgia © Mark Brandon

Brinicle under ice sheet, McMurdo Sound, Antarctica. The brinicle grew in just three hours from the ice sheet above, reaching two metres down to the sea floor, then extending for another six metres along the seabed. © BBC

Sir David Attenborough, who narrated the series, added, “Plants and animals adapted well to survive in those conditions.

Large areas of Antarctica are completely life-less; the few species that managed to solve the problems of living at those temperatures thrive in great numbers.”

The programmes focused on the four seasons, the indigenous

“…the challenge was to explain the largest seasonal changes on the planet, and also portray the longer term change.”

peoples and scientists of the polar regions, and finally an episode about climate change.

Dr Brandon believes a series about the polar regions could not give a full picture of polar science without covering climate change. “We wanted to show what rising temperatures observed by scientists mean to the environment, the people and animals living there, as well as the effect it will have on the rest of the planet. To tell the story of the poles, we had to explain that the Arctic is largely ocean with a few metres of sea ice cover, whereas the Antarctic is a continent covered with ice kilometres thick.

With this parameter in mind, the challenge was to explain the largest seasonal changes on the planet, and also portray the longer term change.”

Sir David, who famously visited the North Pole for the first time for this series, explained the impact of global warming on the polar ice caps. “Global warming will have a huge effect in the north, but less of a visible effect in the immediate future in the south. Because the South Pole is so high and the ice is thick, global warming will take a long time to warm it up. But Arctic ice is much thinner, and when that melts it will have a hugely changing effect.

You won’t be able to walk on it, and people won’t be able to live in the way they did. Being able to

sail from the Pacific to the Arctic will have lasting consequences – people will go there for economic reasons, and oil reserves will be more accessible. If permafrost melts because of increased traffic, it will have a vast effect on plants and animals.”

Frozen Planet showed brinicles (ice stalactites) growing for the first time. Filmed below the sea ice at the base of the Mount Erebus volcano, they extend down to the seabed, enclosing and freezing everything they touch, including sea urchins and starfish.

According to Dr Brandon, freezing seawater has a sponge-like consistency, with a network of tiny brine channels within it. “In winter, the air temperature above sea ice can be below -20°C, while the sea water is around -1.9°C. Heat flows from the warmer sea up to the very cold air, forming new ice from the bottom. The freezing seawater forces salt into the brine channels.

Because it is colder and salty, it is denser than the water beneath, which causes brine to sink in a descending plume. Brine leaving the sea ice freezes the relatively fresh seawater it comes in contact with. Fragile tubes of ice around the descending plume grow, and are now called brinicles or ice stalactites. They are found in both the Arctic and the Antarctic, but it has to be relatively calm for them to grow as long as the ones seen on Frozen Planet.”

The

Geographer

Opinion: Alexander Kellas

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Himalayan Hero Ian R Mitchell

It is unlikely that many people have heard of Alexander Kellas.

Yet a century ago he was widely regarded as the foremost Himalayan mountaineer and explorer in the world.

After his death in 1921, two memorials were erected to him in Tibet, and two Himalayan peaks were named in his honour. Lauded by all the mountaineers and explorers of the Himalaya from Mallory to Freshfield, Kellas’s fame later dimmed and, in the ‘Heroic Age of Himalayan Mountaineering’ in the 1950s, he vanished off the radar almost completely.

Kellas was born in Aberdeen in 1868 of a middle class family; as a youth, he explored the Cairngorm Mountains with his brother, staying often under the Shelter Stone near Ben MacDhui.

He was a strong walker with great stamina, and he continued his mountaineering in Scotland, and made a few trips to the Alps, after moving to London. There, he worked at University College in the Chemistry Department under Professor Ramsay, who was in 1904 to be awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the inert gases, work in which Kellas was involved. At UCL, Kellas also met the famous mountaineer Norman Collie, though they seldom teamed up on the mountains, Kellas preferring the life of a solo mountaineer.

Collie had however been to the Himalaya, and in 1895 had, with Mummery, made the first attempt on a Himalayan 8,000 metre peak, Nanga Parbat, in which Mummery died. Possibly this helps to explain Kellas’s sudden, rather late, decision to become a Himalayan mountaineer. In 1907, he made the first of several trips to the Garhwal area of India, and more especially to Sikkim, on which region he became a leading authority. Over the next 14 years, he explored the approaches both to Mount

Everest and to Kangchenjunga, his latter explorations being highly regarded by the various German expeditions which attempted the peak in the 1930s.

His knowledge of Everest made him a natural choice for inclusion in the first Mount Everest Expedition of 1921 and, had he not been in his 50s, he would have been in all likelihood, as suggested by Freshfield and Collie, its leader.

Before that date, Kellas had climbed several peaks in Sikkim above 20,000 feet, and had spent more time at that altitude than any man alive. These ascents, of Chomiomo, Kangchenjhau and Pauhunri amongst others, were not repeated for many years, and defeated several strong mountaineers who followed Kellas. One of the many tragedies of Kellas’s life is that Pauhunri, at 23,375 feet, which he climbed in 1911, was the highest summit till then attained by man, and remained so for almost 20 years. However, erroneous measurements gave this honour to the much easier peak of Trisul, which had been climbed by Tom Longstaff in 1907, and Kellas was ignorant of his achievement.

Kellas also visited the even higher mountain of Kamet, in the Garhwal, on several occasions. In 1920, he and Morshead reached over 23,000 feet; they were probably capable of reaching the summit when a porters’ rebellion at the prospect of staying out overnight ended the attempt. On Kamet, Kellas, who by now was the world’s leading expert on high altitude physiology, carried out experiments relating to the use of oxygen at altitude, studies which had occupied him for many years. His death on the 1921 Everest Expedition meant that no further experiments were carried out. In subsequent years, the British approach to the ascent of Everest adopted a scientific

amateurism far from Kellas’s approach, that in all possibility delayed a successful summit attempt till 1953, by which time Kellas was forgotten.

He died at Kampa Dzong in Tibet, from a combination of dysenteric illness brought about by bad food, and the effects of his strenuous mountaineering activities in Sikkim before he joined the 1921 Everest Expedition. Memorials were erected at his grave and, in 1924, at the Rongbuk Glacier, where Kellas was commemorated alongside Mallory and Irvine (and several sherpas) who had just lost their lives. Kellas Rock Peak near Everest was named after him, as was Kellas Peak in Sikkim – which is still unclimbed.

Another tragedy for Kellas was that he died the day before the Expedition saw Mount Everest, which they did shortly after leaving his graveside.

Denied a sight of Chomolungma, denied the mountain summit altitude he had unknowingly gained, Kellas has also been denied recognition as an explorer, mountaineer and high altitude physiological pioneer.

Partly as an awkward provincial, ungainly and prone to mental heath problems, he did not fit the image of ‘Hero’ in the way Mallory did. Partly, again unlike Mallory, he was no self-publicist, contributing only a few articles to academic journals, and he kept no diary, wrote few letters.

Hopefully, Alexander Kellas’s massive contribution to the story of Himalayan exploration and mountaineering will now be recognised.

“...Kellas had climbed several peaks in Sikkim above 20,000 feet, and had spent more time at that altitude than any man alive. “ Prelude to Everest, by award-winning mountain writer Ian R Mitchell and scientist George Rodway, is described by Doug Scott as “a compulsive and fascinating account of one of the great pioneers of Himalayan climbing”.

Kellas’s journey encompasses struggles, explorations, and discoveries which influenced mountaineering from the early 20th century to the present day, and arguably mark Kellas as Scotland’s greatest mountaineer.

Ian Mitchell will be speaking about Alexander Kellas to RSGS audiences in Aberdeen, Dunfermline, Helensburgh and Kirkcaldy in March 2012.

March 2012

Expert Views: The Scots Before Scott

John Murray and the Publishing of Scottish Polar Explorers David McClay, Curator, John Murray Archive, National Library of Scotland

Murray was also important in polar publishing as proprietor of the influential periodical the Quarterly Review, whose articles had particular authority thanks to the involvement of Sir John Barrow, Second Secretary to the Admiralty.

Coloured engraving published by John Murray in 1823: Expedition doubling Cape Barrow, July 25 1821.

“Polar accounts were often lavishly illustrated and expensive works. They could make their authors large sums of money...”

Part of an Arctic map published by John Murray in 1823: An Outline to shew the Connected Discoveries of Captains Ross, Parry & Franklin, in the years 1818, 19, 20 and 21.

During the 19th century, the polar regions were some of the last great unexplored areas of the globe.

The focus was on the Arctic, with a range of goals and ambitions; scientifically to find the Magnetic North Pole, geographically to map and record, commercially to find a navigable Northwest Passage, and patriotically to do all this first.

These and other interests combined to provide impetus to Arctic exploration and to create an eager readership at home, who were often less interested in scientific results, but more enthralled by tales of suffering and death, of dramatic failure as much as heroic success. Polar accounts were often lavishly illustrated and expensive.

They could make their authors large sums of money, providing an opportunity to defend their actions and build a scientific and public profile.

One of the leading publishers of these polar narratives was Londonbased John Murray. He was well placed, as official publisher to the Admiralty and unofficial publisher to the Royal Geographical Society.

Images reproduced by kind permission of the Trustees of the National Library of

Murray was involved in publishing narratives and reviews of a number of notable Scottish polar explorers, the first of whom was Sir John Ross, whose first Arctic exploration was recounted in A voyage of discovery … for the purposes of exploring Baffin’s Bay, and inquiring into the probability of a North-West Passage (1819).

Ross was deceived by a mirage and turned away from the route of the Passage. Although Murray had published Ross’s account, Barrow, through a lengthy article in the Quarterly Review, conducted a savage, scathing and sarcastic attack on Ross for his failure. As the Quarterly Review boasted of a circulation of 13,000 copies, considerable damage was done to Ross’s reputation.

Although Murray did publish Ross’s subsequent defence, An explanation of Captain Sabine’s remarks on the late voyage of discovery to Baffin’s Bay (1819), Barrow and Ross had become bitter enemies, so Ross refused to publish his Narrative of a Second Voyage in Search of a NorthWest Passage (1835) with Murray, instead publishing profitably through subscription.

Accompanying Ross on his early voyages was his nephew James Clark Ross. Through these and William Parry’s expeditions, he built a reputation as one of the finest polar explorers. Although he also failed to find the Northwest Passage, he displayed growing polar competence by surviving for long periods and making extensive sledging journeys which allowed him to reach the Scotland.

North Magnetic Pole in 1831.

Ross was also amongst the first to consider the Antarctic worth exploring, which he did between 1839 and 1843. By sailing around the vast coastlines of the continent, Ross established that Antarctica was a continent, and discovered a massive ice shelf that was later named after him. Ross also enhanced his authority in terrestrial magnetism by predicting the South Magnetic Pole in his Murraypublished A Voyage of Discovery and Research to southern and Antarctic regions, during the years 1839-43 (1843).

Perhaps the most famous of Murray’s polar explorers was Sir John Franklin. Accompanying him on his early expeditions was surgeon and naturalist Sir John Richardson, with Murray publishing his zoological Fauna borealiamericana (1829).

Richardson did not accompany Franklin’s final and fatal expedition of 1845. However, the strong friendship between Richardson and Franklin, forged through earlier shared deprivations including starvation and death of colleagues, meant that Richardson felt obliged to lead, in 1848–49, one of the many expeditions to discover Franklin’s fate.

Richardson was accompanied by fellow Scot Dr John Rae, a respected Arctic explorer noted for his geographical and meteorological research, as well as for his adaptation to the Arctic winter. It was Rae in 1853 who discovered the tragic fate of Franklin and his party by recovering his possessions. Rae’s findings were published widely, including by Murray in the Royal Geographical Society Journal (1855).

Polar exploration during the 19th century began in the age of sail and ended with steam. It started with a focus on the Arctic and led to the dawn of the great age of Antarctic exploration. What united all of these endeavours is a remarkable legacy of published travel accounts, and the archival richness which allows an insight into their creation and reception.

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Scotland in the Antarctic

Dr Geoff Swinney ARSGS FSAScot, National Museums of Scotland

In October 1902, The Scotsman reported on the imminent departure of the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition (SNAE), led by William Speirs Bruce: “it partakes of a national character, for the money has been raised in Scotland, the ship has been all but rebuilt in Scotland, the scientific staff and crew, with perhaps one or two exceptions, are Scotsmen. Scotland has thus done her share in the work which is going forward in the Antarctic”.

As the report trumpeted, in planning the expedition Bruce had drawn on a range of resources that was distinctively Scottish.

Scotland’s east coast ports’ long association with sealing and whaling had honed seamen skilled in navigating icy seas, supported by shipbuilding yards experienced in constructing or strengthening vessels for work on the fringes of the polar ice.

The liberal intellectual climate of Scotland was another resource upon which Bruce drew. At the end of the 19th century, Edinburgh was the centre of the new science of oceanography. The scientific programme of the circumpolar voyage of HMS Challenger in 1872-74 had been devised by the expedition’s scientific leader, Charles Wyville Thomson, Professor of Natural History in the University of Edinburgh.

At Thomson’s insistence, the observations from the expedition were processed in Edinburgh. As a young medical student, Bruce himself had assisted in this process.

Following Thomson’s death, John Murray assumed responsibility for completing the scientific work on the Challenger collections, and founded the Granton Marine Laboratory. It was a course organised by Patrick Geddes at the Granton Laboratory that first drew Bruce to Scotland.

Through this course, and through Geddes’s novel and experimental form of student social living, the hall of residence, Bruce became enmeshed in a network of scientists at the cutting-edge of their subjects.

It was here, too, that he became inculcated with a Scottish/

Celtic cultural renascence being promoted by Geddes. Indeed Bruce subsequently came to view the SNAE as a scientific contribution to this renascence, which was otherwise being conducted mainly in literature and in art by the likes of William G Burn Murdoch. It was through Geddes that Bruce and Burn Murdoch together first gained knowledge of whalers and the Antarctic, by joining the experimental Dundee Whaling Expedition. The expedition sailed in the austral summer of 189293, in search of new whaling grounds in the Weddell Sea. Bruce sailed as ship’s surgeon, with Burn Murdoch, later described as the first artist-in-residence in Antarctica, as his assistant.

Geddes was also influential on Bruce in instilling in him a holistic view of science, of a sort which by the end of the 19th century was already unfashionable as knowledge fragmented into disciplines. Bruce was not just an oceanographer, a zoologist, a meteorologist, a hydrographer, a medical man, or an explorer; he was all of these.

The physical, as well as the intellectual, climate also played its part. Having become enthralled by polar regions, but unable to fund an expedition, he spent a year at that place in Scotland which most closely approximates conditions at high latitudes – at the Ben Nevis Observatory he refined his skills as a meteorologist, and learned practical skills such as skiing, and living and working as part of a small and isolated team.

The climate also made Scotland the source of clothing suited to polar work. Fair Isle knitwear, with its traditional three colour patterns produced through the knit having three layers of wool, offered good insulating qualities. It was the Scottish textile industry which provided not only the garments

worn on the SNAE but also much of the expedition’s funding, 80% of which, along with the knitwear, was given by the Coats brothers of Paisley.

The appeal to a sense of national identity was a distinctive feature of Bruce’s fund-raising, although one which restricted his funding base and ultimately curtailed the scientific programme.

Nonetheless, in the words of the historian of oceanography Tony Rice, the SNAE undertook “a more comprehensive programme than that of any previous or contemporary Antarctic expedition”.

Another factor in the success of the expedition was the existence of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. The Society as promoter and supporter gave the SNAE the authority of an organisation with an established tradition of informed geographical enquiry, and its Magazine provided a means to promote the expedition, report on its progress, and disseminate its results. Coats sat on the RSGS Council, and RSGS supporters funded almost the entire expedition. When the SNAE sailed from Troon on 2nd November 1902 aboard its vessel Scotia, it carried southwards much that was founded on the traditions of Scottish intellectual enquiry and of practical know-how.

“Bruce became enmeshed in a network of scientists at the cuttingedge of their subjects.”

This group photograph was taken in March 1904 while the Scotia was beset in heavy pack ice at the most southerly point (74°1’S 22°0’W) reached by the 1902-1904 Scottish National Antarctic Expedition. © RSGS

Off The Beaten Track

The Wild North - Fury Bay John Beatty

John Beatty is an outstanding British nature, travel and adventure photographer, his international reputation based on a portfolio of extraordinary images that celebrate the beauty, variety and magnificence of landscape and nature around the world. With seven key sections of stunning photography and evocative essays (Origins & Species, Himal, Africa, The High Arctic, Northern Forests, The Grand Canyon of the Colorado, Home), Wild Vision is his first retrospective.

“Nowhere has knowledge been purchased at greater cost of privation or suffering.”

Fridtjof Nansen

“...I was invited to join them. Little did I know that this experience would be one of the most fascinating, and eventually dangerous, adventures of my life.”

All images © John Beatty

Main image: Decaying iceberg

Inset: Old Arctic sea ice in the Beaufort Sea.

The air was cold and still. I sat outside my tent in the grey polar evening gazing at the mute colours of the inlet; tawny shell browns streaked with yellowflecked ochre, interspersed by curvaceous aquamarine of the glacial river channels that swung through the gravel strands. A small caribou migration had recently passed; antlers and bones were scattered on the tundra; dung trails pressed into lichen would provide nutrients for years to come.

A distant engine droned out of a grey Arctic sky, and descended; with a fluttering and a squeak of tyres on the shingle, it slithered to a halt by my tent. Three men jumped out and strode toward me, one with a heavy bound ledger under his arm. I opened the canvas flap and offered them tea. They were archaeologists from Winnipeg University, calling by in their Twin Otter en route across Somerset Island in search of the legendary Arctic beach of Fury Bay. The time was 1am, the light dim and pearlescent in the overcast sky, but tea and laughter produced the desired result: I was invited to join them. Little did I know that this experience would be one of the most fascinating, and eventually dangerous, adventures of my life.

Between 1820 and 1825, Sir William Edward Parry, a British sea captain fresh from the offices of navigator on Spitzbergen guarding the whaling fleet, made three attempts to discover a Northwest Passage to Cathay over the Canadian Arctic. His partial success was crucial in the understanding of the geography of the archipelago of icebound fragments of land west of Lancaster Sound. In 1824, on his third voyage in the two naval ships of HMS Hecla and HMS Fury, Fury became fast in ice on the remote east coast of

Somerset Island. Not wanting to remain for a further winter, Parry doubled his crew into HMS Hecla and forced a retreat through the pack ice, escaping into the Bering Strait and home to England.

HMS Fury was left to disintegrate in the pressure of winter ice, but not before Parry had emptied all stores, longboats and furnishings ashore on what he had named Fury Bay. These stores proved to be a life-saving cache, providing sustenance to future expeditions, including the famous escape of Sir John Ross after he lost HMS Victory in the same bay in 1834. Whilst contemplating the possibility of entering yet another Arctic winter, the Ross party made for the haven of supplies even then known to be ashore on this remote and inhospitable coast. In a recent documentary commentary from his book Fury Beach, Ray Edinger described the scene: “Despite the great odds, their goal was eventually reached, and against all hope the stores at Fury Beach were largely intact, and the crew were elated; even Light admitted that they ‘could not have felt much happier, had they set foot on their native land’. A capacious tent was soon erected, and the men warmed themselves by the stoves as they contemplated what they hoped would be their soon relief. The summer thaw was not far away, and the boats were quickly prepared, only for their crews to meet the most crushing disappointment, as the lone lead in the ice closed about them, leaving them no recourse but to retreat to Fury Beach for another interminable winter.”

We fired up the engines and took to the air in a pre-dawn dash to find Fury Bay, over a hundred miles to the southwest. Below me, the reticulated patterns of hexagonal frost heave were delineated by late snow melt lying in the troughs round the polygonal shapes. The patchwork in the drab brown tundra was cleft with deep post-glacial river valleys gouged by super rivers when the ice sheet retreated.

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The droning and vibrating of the engine was soporific in combination with the elevation in the un-pressurized cabin.

We began to lose height, and to search for signs of human activity along the bare coast.

Perhaps we might spy the foundations of an old Inuit hunting hut, or a discarded barrel hoop from McClintock’s 1857 expedition during his final search for Franklin along this wild shore.

The big tyres hit the ground hard as we bounced on a gravel terrace above the sea, and in a final surge of engine power turned the plane round in a tight circle in readiness for take-off. The side door was pushed open, and we scrambled out onto a flat stony beach 20 metres above the calmly lapping sea. At the back of the beach, a low cliff of loose conglomerate guarded access to the plateau beyond. The sky was a strange deep amethyst in the greying dawn, above a mercury sea littered with flat luminous icebergs.

We stood enraptured in the silence broken only by a passing right whale breathing deeply far offshore.

Peter, who was carrying the ledger, opened it with slow deliberate drama and proclaimed with due gravity, “We are here”.

He pointed to broken fragments of planks and debris of rusted food tins, remnants of winter survival of nearly two centuries ago. McClintock had been here, Dr John Rae, Sir John Ross and cousin James Clark Ross had waited patiently in this loneliest of places, wondering if they might ever return to the world so far away. Down by the sea, a huge pile of barnacled chain heaped at the water’s edge confirmed our location was, indeed, the legendary Fury Bay. I imagined the exhausted crew mates heaving the chain ashore, wondering if they would ever return to their loved ones, or die

of fearful cold and starvation, unable to summon rescue or effect safe retreat. The pressing weight of Arctic history fell across us like a heavy pall.

Surveys, measurements and photographs were taken, and we prepared to leave. The pilot paced out the maximum length of useable beach and declared it was too short. We dragged the Otter backwards until its tail wheel was resting on the last possible boulder before a deep trench. He did

not speak but gesticulated for us to climb aboard and lock the doors. His eyes focussed on the near horizon, we tightened our seatbelts to the last buckle.

He pushed all accelerators in the flight cabin to maximum against the stops. The engines screamed at maximum revs, vibrating the fuselage into a hideous convulsion. He held it on the brakes for agonizing seconds, and then threw the levers off. In the same instant that the plane lurched forwards, he snatched the flaps back to lift us with a powerful jump into the air, perhaps only five metres high. At the same time, we plunged off the edge of the gravel terrace and sank towards the sea’s surface only fifty metres below. The airframe screamed with wind pressure in a ghastly

stall, only making airspeed as we wave-hopped and lurched along the very surface of the water… slowly, so slowly gathering speed and lift like a crow with a full belly. Fifty, one hundred, one hundred and fifty, we rose high into the air, from what had felt certain oblivion. Every one of us had held our breath, and now burst out in relief, shouting, cheering and punching the air. We subsided and stared out at the new morning’s silvery sea, thinking about HMS Fury lying on the seabed below, of the agony of Crozier’s men marching south in vain attempt to make the mainland.

Each in our own thoughts, we remained in silence all the way back to camp.

Images top to bottom: Icebergs along the coast of Boothia Peninsula.

Twin Otter aircraft on Fury Beach, awaiting an attempt to take off.

The Franklin graves on Beechey Island.

Tranquility in the Bellot Strait, Somerset Island.

Walrus on an ice flow haul-out.

Image centre: Arctic fox in winter pelage.

Somerset Island, the twelfth largest Canadian island, is set within the Arctic Circle north of Canada’s most northerly point, the Boothia Peninsula, lying closely south of Cornwallis Island and Devon Island amongst the complex channels of the Northwest Passage.

Expert View: Permafrost

The Sleeping Giant of the Circumpolar Arctic Colin Ballantyne, Professor of Physical Geography, University of St Andrews

“A recent estimate suggests that, globally, permafrost contains at least twice as much carbon as the atmosphere.”

Erosion of an ice wedge on Ellesmere Island (78°N) reveals an active layer 0.5m thick overlying ice-rich permafrost. The permafrost here extends at least 600m below the ground surface.

The circumpolar Arctic contains some of the most extensive wildernesses on Earth. It is impossible to visit the polar deserts of northernmost Canada, the vast tundra plains of Yakutia, the apparently endless taiga forests of the sub-Arctic, or the austere mountains of Svalbard or Alaska without appreciating the desolate beauty of these empty landscapes. Yet hidden a metre or less below the surface is a sleeping giant that could threaten the climatic stability of the entire planet: permafrost.

Permafrost is perennially frozen ground: rock or soil that remains below 0°C throughout the year.

It underlies an astonishing 24% of the land surface of the northern hemisphere, mainly in the circumpolar Arctic and subArctic. At its southern margins, the circum-Arctic permafrost is patchy in distribution (sporadic permafrost) and only a few decimetres or metres thick.

Farther north, where winters are longer and colder, it underlies most but not all of the terrain (discontinuous permafrost) and achieves depths of tens of metres.

Around margins of the Arctic Ocean, it is pervasive (continuous permafrost) and reaches depths of 600-800m.

The top of the permafrost, or permafrost table, is overlain by a shallow layer of soil, the active layer, which thaws out annually during the brief Arctic summer.

Near the southern margins of circum-Arctic permafrost, the active layer reaches depths of 1-3m, but in the high Arctic this zone of seasonal freezing and thawing rarely exceeds 50cm in depth.

Permafrost is by definition simply a thermal state of the ground, but extensive areas of permafrost contain bodies of almost pure ground ice. Left undisturbed,

such ice-rich permafrost is inert, and represented by a range of intriguing landforms such as ice-wedge polygons, ice-cored hills (pingos) or, in mountainous areas, lobate masses of slow-moving, ice-cored debris called rock glaciers. However, if the thermal regime of the ground surface is changed so that more heat is transferred into the ground, the active layer deepens and ice below the permafrost table melts, causing ground subsidence. As the distribution of ice in permafrost is uneven, some areas subside more than others, producing a hummocky landscape of irregular, water-filled depressions termed thermokarst. Subsidence due to thaw of ice-rich permafrost poses major challenges for construction of buildings, roads, airstrips or pipelines in permafrost areas, and various engineering solutions are employed to counter this problem, such as building roads on freedraining gravel embankments or constructing heated buildings on piles so that air circulates between the floor of the building and the ground surface.

and slope failures involving slumping and sliding of the active layer over the permafrost table. Arctic coasts composed of icy sediments are experiencing accelerated erosion due to the greater fetch of ice-free ocean, and small islands off the Siberian coast have disappeared during the past few decades as a result.

The most worrying aspect of permafrost thaw, however, is invisible. Much of the Arctic tundra is underlain by frozen soil containing partly decomposed or undecomposed plant matter.

When frozen soil thaws, such organic material is subject to microbial decomposition, which releases carbon dioxide and methane (a potent greenhouse gas) to the atmosphere, thus potentially accelerating the warming that triggered permafrost thaw in the first place.

A recent estimate suggests that, globally, permafrost contains at least twice as much carbon as the atmosphere. If even a small fraction of this were to be released to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, the impact on climate would have global repercussions. The sleeping giant under the Arctic tundra is stirring, and future generations may have cause to regret disturbing his sleep.

A much more serious problem is that climate-change models indicate that warming of air temperatures due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions will be most pronounced in high latitudes.

There is clear evidence of such warming in some temperature records, in the ice loss of small glaciers, and in a drastic reduction of summer sea-ice cover in the Arctic Ocean.

Deepening of the active layer in response to warmer Arctic summers has already caused widespread extension Approximate distribution of circumpolar permafrost in the northern hemisphere. Continuous permafrost underlies 90-100% of the land surface, of areas of discontinuous permafrost 50-90%, and sporadic permafrost 10-50%.

Siberian Permafrost also occurs under polar ice caps and the Greenland Ice Sheet, and thermokarst, subsea permafrost is present under shallow seas fringing the Arctic Ocean.

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Geographer

Opinion: Pesticides

12-13

Winter 2011 -12

The Arctic Paradox Marla Cone

At Christmas time, cradled in pure white snow, polar bears are born blind, toothless, a pound apiece, as feeble as kittens. The cubs nestle in a den carved by their mother on the bleak, snowy banks of a frozen sea 600 miles from the North Pole. Etched by harsh winds and ancient glaciers, Norway’s Svalbard is a brutal place, unforgiving of weaknesses. From the moment of birth, even conception, animals here struggle against the odds.

Most newborn polar bears die even under the best natural conditions.

Yet it is an unnatural threat that is imperilling these creatures of the High Arctic. Before they even leave the safety of their dens, Svalbard’s polar bear cubs already harbour more pollutants in their bodies than most other creatures on Earth. Their mothers store a lifetime of industrial chemicals and pesticides in their bodies – peaking in concentration during the winter fast when they give birth – and then they bequeath it, via their rich fatty milk, to their cubs.

Arctic but, because of prevailing winds and ocean currents, pollution generated in the planet’s midlatitudes inevitably migrates north. Chemicals spilled in urban centres, sprayed on farm fields, or synthesized in factories, become hitchhikers embarking on a global voyage. Carried by winds, waves, and rivers, they migrate drop by drop from cities in the US, Europe, and Russia into the bodies of Arctic animals and people a world away.

Chemicals such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) condense in the winter cold and evaporate in spring.

Looking for a cold place to settle, they hop around the world, always headed north. The Arctic becomes their final resting place; there

Guardians of one of Earth’s A pair of two day old polar bear cubs. © BBC Frozen Planet last, largest and most desolate wildernesses, the people and they endure for decades, perhaps animals of the Arctic are hundreds centuries, and are consumed by of miles from any significant source marine animals, accumulating in of pollution, yet paradoxically their fat. About 200 toxic pesticides they are among the planet’s most and industrial compounds have contaminated living organisms. been detected in the bodies of What was once pristine has the Arctic’s indigenous people and become a deep-freeze archive, animals, including the ‘Dirty Dozen’ storing memories of the industrial (persistent organic pollutants and world’s pollution. This is the ‘Arctic pesticides such as DDT, mirex, and Paradox’, arguably the most severe chlordane, banned decades ago), case of environmental injustice on heavy metals like mercury, a potent Earth. Exposed to extreme levels neurotoxicant released by coalof the same contaminants found burning power plants, and some in virtually everyone on the planet, relative newcomers, including flame the inhabitants of the Arctic have retardants found in furnishings and become the industrialized world’s electronics, and a chemical used to lab rats, the involuntary subjects of manufacture Teflon. an unintentional human experiment These chemicals can harm people that reveals what happens when and animals in ways that are a boundless brew of chemicals hidden from the naked eye, and builds up in the environment. The the impacts on living organisms Inuit living in northern Greenland are often unpredictable. They contain the highest concentrations can mutate or activate genes and of chemical contaminants found in damage cells, which can trigger humans anywhere on Earth. cancer or other diseases, and There are no pesticides or factories or coal-burning power plants in the

© John Beatty

scramble hormones to render an animal’s offspring feminized or

infertile. They can thin a bird’s eggshells, killing its chicks, enter the brain of a human foetus and jumble its architecture, and suppress immune cells and antibodies, weakening the body’s ability to fight off disease and infections. Studies of children in Greenland, the Faroe Islands and Arctic Canada have linked the chemicals to subtle injuries that might jeopardize their health.

Mothers and babies are the most vulnerable because the chemicals permeate the womb, moving from mother to foetus just when the baby is growing and most susceptible to damage to its brain, reproductive organs and immune system. Arctic children suffer extraordinarily high rates of infectious diseases, such as ear infections that recur so often they cause permanent hearing loss. Tests show that prenatal exposure to mercury and PCBs alters their brain development, slightly reducing their intelligence and memory skills.

As for the polar bears, their immune cells and antibodies have been suppressed, and their sex hormones, thyroid hormones, and even bone structure have been altered by PCBs. Scientists suspect that these chemicals are culling Svalbard’s older bears and perhaps weakening or killing cubs. They also might have left a missing generation of mother bears. “Could you realistically put 200 to 500 foreign compounds into an organism and expect them to have absolutely no effect?” says polar bear scientist Andy Derocher.

“Polar bears carry a huge variety of pollutants. I would be happier if I could find no evidence of pollution affecting polar bears, but so far, the data suggest otherwise.”

While some contaminants have decreased in recent years, others are growing. And the Arctic, frozen in time, slow to heal, will be haunted by its toxic legacy for countless generations to come.

Awarded a major grant by the Pew Charitable Trusts to conduct an exhaustive study of the deteriorating environment of the Arctic, Los Angeles Times environmental reporter Marla Cone travelled across the Arctic, from Greenland to the Aleutian Islands, to find out why the Arctic is toxic. Silent Snow is a scientific journey, and a personal one.

“What was once pristine has become a deep-freeze archive, storing memories of the industrial world’s pollution.”

Expert View: Predicting Ice Sheets

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet

David Sugden, Professor Emeritus, School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh

“...we require information from the central ice dome.

Scottish universities are deeply involved in such future work.”

David Sugden on the middle of the ice dome. © Chris Fogwill Chris Fogwill collecting a sample from an erratic deposited on the mountain slope when the ice was thicker in the past. © David Sugden

Did the West Antarctic Ice Sheet survive the last interglacial 120,000 years ago when the world was a little warmer than at present?

Our inability to answer this question undermines attempts to predict the future of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and its effect on global sea-level change.

A dominant hypothesis is that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet disappeared under the slightly warmer climatic and oceanic conditions of the last interglacial (Dynamic). An alternative emerging hypothesis suggests the West Antarctic Ice Sheet may have varied in elevation but that it persisted as a coherent ice sheet during the last interglacial (Stable). The co-existence of two opposing hypotheses implies that we have a limited level of understanding of the principal controls on ice-sheet stability. In turn, this undermines attempts to predict the future of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and its effect on global sea-level.

Most research on the Antarctic Ice Sheet relies on satellite observations which are used to monitor changes in velocity and elevation over recent decades, while predictions of future changes rely on ice-sheet models. Both approaches would be enhanced if we knew what happened during the last glacial cycle; the longer term perspective would tell of the trajectory of change upon which decadal changes are superimposed, while testing glaciological models against the past is a powerful way of knowing how good they are.

Dynamic behaviour Modelling and observations point towards dynamic ice-sheet behaviour, with the West Antarctic Ice Sheet growing and declining in response to global forcing.

Such work, mostly based on the Pacific-facing sector, suggests that, since the ice sheet is grounded below sea level, it is sensitive to rising sea level and

increased melting from rising ocean temperatures. If it were to collapse, it would raise global sea level by 3.3-5.0m.

The fear that the ice sheet could go is based on several arguments. First, satellite observations show that Pine Island Glacier, one of the main glaciers draining into the Pacific sector, is retreating, and indeed has thinned as far as 150km inland in the last two decades.

The retreat and thinning is linked to warmer than usual ocean temperatures melting the underside of the glacier snout which is afloat. Second, this modern trend is superimposed on top of retreat since the Last Glacial Maximum, for example, by some 700km in the last 8,000 years in the Ross Sea. Third, modelling shows that it is feasible for the retreat and thinning to extend to the interior, the ‘weak underbelly’, where the ice sheet is grounded on a bed well below sea level. Finally, far-field studies of tropical reefs and ocean cores reveal that global sea level during the last interglacial was higher than at present. The missing water is assumed to be at least partly due to the loss of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

Stable behaviour Recent work, mainly involving researchers from Scotland, has extended into the Weddell Sea Embayment, the Atlanticfacing sector of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. Here, to our considerable surprise, the emerging story seems different. The work is based mainly on exposure-age dating of boulders on nunataks protruding above the ice, a technique that establishes how long a boulder has been exposed to cosmic rays since being deposited by the ice.

Thus, one can track

thinning of the ice sheet against mountain dipsticks. Work in the Ellsworth Mountains suggests that thickening during the Last Glacial Maximum was less than a few hundred metres, much less than predicted beforehand.

Even more surprising, Andy Hein and others found that major ice streams draining a significant part of the Antarctic Ice Sheet into the Weddell Sea sector had not thickened at all during the Last Glacial Maximum. Such inertia at a time of massive global sea-level change points to ice-sheet stability.

The apparent contrast between the Pacific and Atlantic sectors of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is challenging and important to understand. Perhaps it points to the role of sub-glacial topography in influencing icesheet dynamics. If so, here is another factor, in addition to climate and sea level, that needs to be considered when predicting ice-sheet behaviour.

In order to explore this contrast in behaviour between the Pacific and Atlantic sectors of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, we require information from the central ice dome. Scottish universities are deeply involved in such future work. Sampling the sediments in the subglacial Lake Ellsworth beneath the central dome is one approach (Martin Siegert and team). Another is to apply exposure-age dating to nunataks close to the central ice dome (Andy Hein, David Sugden and SUERC).

The

Geographer

Opinion: The Northern Lights

14-15

Winter 2011 -12

Auroral Delights

“Through my travels, I’ve met many kinds of aurora watchers, including space physicists, artists, tribal elders, photographers and many others.”

Kenny Taylor

Northern Lights: Aurora borealis.

Whether in English or Latin, these words can send a shiver through many that hear them. They always do so with me, conjuring many possibilities in mind, like the sound of a wolf howl in the Arctic night.

They hold a sense of magic. For this is a phenomenon that seems both of this world and yet utterly other. As if a spell was somehow made visible.

From a human perspective, both the Northern Lights and their southern hemisphere counterpart, the Aurora australis, are nocturnal phenomena. Satellites see it differently. From their orbits in near space, using imagery that can register wavelengths invisible to the human eye, some show that auroras are an ever-present aspect of the region where Earth’s atmosphere touches space. They may not be spectacular, nor cover large areas, yet they are there, day or night.

Nowadays, you can check on that activity, almost in real time, using websites linked to feeds from satellites. NASA – the USbased National Aeronautics and Space Administration – is fairly free with its data in this way, for example. And for those who know how to interpret the graphs, the information can be a boon.

Satellite feeds and websites apart, for most of us who are groundbased and use only the information from our senses to further our aurora watching, clear, cold, winter nights – the darker the better – seem to be the natural domain of the phenomenon. Yet the word ‘aurora’ means ‘dawn’ in Italian.

It was

the great Italian polymath, Galileo Galilei, who was among the first to refer to aurora in the way that is now generally understood

by English speakers.

He used the phrase ‘questa boreale aurora’ – ‘this northern dawn’. It appeared in a lecture in which he suggested a possible cause of this weird illumination of the sky, so brilliant at times, he said, that it “yields nothing to the brightest dawn”.

Galileo’s idea was that vapour-laden air, rising high above the Earth, might be struck by sunlight and “made to reflect its splendour”.

The words have a poetic ring and, perhaps fittingly for one of the key thinkers to challenge the old orthodoxy that the Earth was at the centre of the universe, make an intriguing association with the sun.

Centuries after his death, Galileo’s linkage of sun and Earth through auroras is at the heart of much contemporary scientific research into the phenomenon. Eruptions of electro-magnetically guided material from sunspot regions, including protons and electrons, are major contributors to big auroras.

But at any time, there’s an outflow of sub-atomic particles reaching us from the sun. It is those tiny, interplanetary travellers, together with particles drawn upwards from Earth in so-called ‘polar auroral fountains’, that stoke the auroral glows. As they hit oxygen and nitrogen molecules and atoms in the upper atmosphere, the energy transfer is expressed, in part, as light.

That’s just a tiny part of the science of auroras. But they also have a very different fascination, born of how they look, how they move and, in some

circumstances (though not yet in my experience), how they sound.

They can be like shimmering folds of fabric, bright as cloth of gold.

They can be moving spotlights of intense, white light, or writhing serpents of green and yellow, vibrant as molten metal.

They can pulse, sweep the sky, or cascade from the celestial zenith.

Or they can stay utterly still, suffusing the heavens with ghostly pastel. Such contrasting moods and colours are part of their appeal for me. Part of the reason why I’ve travelled great swathes of the northern world, including at some of the coldest times of year, in pursuit of them.

My quest has led me to places such as central Alaska, the Northwest Territories of Canada, and Arctic Norway in months when the average temperature, during daylight hours, drops to 10, 20 or even 30 degrees Celsius below zero. Through my travels, I’ve met many kinds of aurora watchers, including space physicists, artists, tribal elders, photographers and many others. People who – like I do – hunger for the next encounter with ‘The Lights’.

For all of us aurora-struck Earthlings, the next few years should bring plenty of rewards. The sun is once again very active, in the upward phase of the 24th sunspot cycle since records began.

Scientific understanding is sure to increase. So too will the sheer pleasure that many people will have through observing perhaps the most impressive of all celestial phenomena. Bring on the Dancing Lights!

Kenny Taylor is a Black-Islebased writer who has travelled extensively to view and research auroras, including an assignment for National Geographic.

This article is condensed and up-dated from a broadcast talk he gave for Radio 3’s Twenty Minutes.

Images © Catriona Gilbert

Country On the Map in Focus: Greenland

Disko Bay Dilemmas Ivars Silis

Ivars Silis (www. silis.gl) is a Greenlandic writer, photographer, TV film producer and lecturer.

Disko – The Blue Bay is his unique photographic work about life in and around Disko Bay, an area which for many is the epitome of the Greenland Arctic.

In 16 spectacular chapters, Ivars offers a panorama of natural interaction and diversity of life in an area which is undergoing rapid transformation.

The book is available in English from www.g.dk.

Around the year 1100 AD, a robust hunting tribe whipped their dog teams across the frozen Smith Sound from the Canadian Arctic Archipelago to Northern Greenland.

An outstretched coast with a bounty of seals, walruses, bowhead whales and polar bears awaited them.

This bounty was not always reliable, however, as over time the climate fluctuated, and so did the numbers of sea mammals. To a population reliant on hunting, as these first settlers were, periodical hunger was a faithful companion. Nevertheless, the Inuit population – the so-called ‘Thule culture’ – has ever since been completely dependent on living resources.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the climate changed

once again, this time quite significantly, and Greenland’s waters were filled with fish instead of seals. The hunters had to switch from the harpoon to the despised fishing line.

Fishing of cod, Greenland halibut and shrimps became the main occupation. Due to improved hygiene, and better social and housing conditions in fast-swelling towns, the population grew rapidly, until it reached 56,000 souls. Not many, perhaps, for the world’s biggest island – 2,400,000km2, thirty times the size of Scotland, although mostly hidden under a 2km thick ice cap.

in Thule would be increasingly difficult, as Arctic mammals are retreating with the shrinking ice, but further to the south, other fish species would probably replace the usual ones. Could the dependency on subsidies from the old colonial power Denmark be, if not replaced, then softened by growing income from tourism and small-scale mining?

“The experiences around the world for other small populations with desirable deposits of non-renewable resources, weak economies and high ambitions of independency are scary.”

But has the modest living ‘in harmony with nature’ come to an end or, maybe more precisely, to a point where the sled tracks split in two directions? The future is closing in, and tough decisions have to be taken.

Shall we follow the wellknown traditional sled track, however treacherous, as the lukewarm sea currents have undermined the sea ice, our usual highway? The living of the traditional hunters up

Or shall we follow an unknown new sled track and plunge into a completely different world?

Should we open our waters and ports to shipping taking advantage of massive shortcuts between Europe and the Far East?

Should we stake all on largescale extraction of possible oil and minerals, and exploit the potential for hydroelectric power, with the accompanying invasion of big money, foreign influence and workforces, and the disastrous risk of pollution? Will Greenlanders once again be reduced to spectators in the swirl of development? The experiences

The

Geographer

16-17

Winter 2011 -12

“The future is closing in, and tough decisions have to be taken.”

around the world for other small populations with desirable deposits of non-renewable resources, weak economies and high ambitions of independency are scary.

So where to go? Which track to follow?

Our politicians are tempted to choose gold, independence and risk. The population hesitates, stamping in the snow; all those promises are so shiny, but the risks are immense, with a possibility even of losing cultural identity. And in the meantime, life goes on as it used to.

Disko Bay on the west coast of Greenland contains the essence of Greenland and its dilemmas.

It has always been blessed with some of the best hunting and fishing grounds in the whole of the Arctic. European whalers from England, Hamburg and Scotland once struck oil riches here. Now the Scots are back with the same intentions, although the technique has changed; the oil company Cairn Energy has recently begun to drill offshore for oil and gas.

It was on Disko Island that I arrived as a greenhorn – and as a geophysicist – back in 1964, and lost my heart forever to the harsh living conditions. And it was here that I returned in

May 2011, during two years of intensive travels with my photo bag and a burden of more than 40 years of Arctic experience, resulting in my book, Disko - The Blue Bay. All photographs © Ivars Silis

Education Teaching aid in Kiita Learning Community, Barrow. Alaska.

A Tanik’s Snowball

Alistair Thomson, Principal Teacher of Art, Alford Academy, Aberdeenshire

My visit to the North Slope of Alaska saw me join the Living Earth Foundation’s Polar Pairs project, alongside colleagues from other Aberdeenshire schools. Jamie Fairbairn, a geographer and Principal Teacher of Humanities at Banff Academy, faithfully kept a journal and shared his thoughts. I’m grateful for his valuable insight.

All images © Alistair Thomson

The Living Earth Foundation works with all sectors of society to build and nurture an environment which enables people to develop effective solutions to environmental and social concerns.

See livingearth. org.uk for more information.

The warm welcome at Barrow Airport is followed by the slap of Arctic air as we walk to the obligatory 4x4. The February evening is plummeting towards -250C, which we are told is mild.

The still air is dry, and breath does not mist; zero humidity means that the familiar aspects of our own winter are missing. There are immutable truths here. The ‘30 rule’ warns that -300 at 30 mph for 30 seconds will freeze flesh.

Jamie and I take a midnight stroll to the bank of snow that marks the edge of the roadway by the shore. We wrap up and walk into the sodium vapour-lit night. The snow quakes under our feet. A single pick-up truck moves by, the Inupiat driver gesticulating angrily at us. Our jet-lag addled minds do not comprehend his apparent aggression.

Beyond the perimeter lie mounds of cleared snow, offering an ideal spot to sit in the dark and gaze at the Aurora borealis. In a few seconds we are in silent awe; the light is there, and growing.

Seduced by this otherworldliness we’re spellbound, then suddenly gripped with a panicked realisation of converging thoughts: polar bears.

At once we are upright and nervously striding fast into the light, hardly able to summon the courage to look back. We are foolish, naive and perhaps lucky not to be dragged off by a hungry bear. It happens; folk come to Barrow and disappear. It’s little wonder that the motorist was so animated.

Kiita Learning Community has a nursery, allowing teenage parents to attend; other students have had drug or drink issues; all

no longer attend Barrow High School. The roll here is over 40, which in a village of under 3,000 people seems high. The situation is symptomatic of opposing forces that are evidently pressuring the community. Tradition and modernity are hugely significant challenges.

The values of the Inupiat are not acquisitive, and the notion of a career is absent from these traditional aspirations. Conversely, western values have dominated in mainstream teaching, offering education that propels the learner to academic success and ultimately university, which means leaving.

monochrome.

A big sky rules over the prone landscape.

This time of year breathes optimism.

It is the end of the long winter night. After months, when the sun appears again, temperatures actually drop as clouds lift. But the sun, like a siren, calls people to the tundra, occasionally never to return.

These teenage students declare their values and cultural distinction easily. One showed a harpoon gun – not a relic, but an important piece of kit.

The pupils Things are seem engaged, changing, and asking about the efforts of hunting and Kiita Learning fishing. What Community are mirrored has become by passionate sport in educators like Scotland is Jana Harcharek, still a way of Director life here. I’ve of Inupiaq A street in Anchorage, around noon, seen the longFebruary. The figure is one of the visiting Education of abandoned Scottish teachers. the North Slope souterrains on Borough School District. She Canna; here, each family keeps has succeeded in her ambition a stock of meat deposited under to see Inupiat culture ground in a similar way, integrated further. She but in permanent freeze. It says “…children should has always been this way. no longer have to leave While the supermarket their identities outside offers convenience, this when they walk into subsistence strategy is their schools. They maintained, as if ready for should learn to think like when the modern world Inupiat because they are leaves.

Inupiat.”

Although they face At Kiita, the desks, the challenges, the Inupiat OHP, the MacBooks are understand their familiar. These young surroundings intimately, people are fully plugged and despite their in to the digital world. separation from our Oil wealth has provided world, they may understand its every teen in the district with an underlying nature better than we Apple computer. The maps are do. It is hard to escape from the out and our Landranger 37 seems realisation that we are removed surreal in this setting. Landforms from our natural environment. and so many icons on the paper In the classroom, macaroon have no equivalence here. With bars and Tunnock’s snowballs limited reference to scale in a are offered to the curious. It’s land with no tree, the terrain the latter that is a big hit, not outside seems elemental, almost

“Oil wealth has provided every teen in the district with an Apple computer.”

The

Geographer Original approach to collaboration and research impact

for the obvious snow-joke but for a phonetic coincidence.

In Inupiaq, a Tanik is a white American from the lower 48th; the sort who get dragged off by a bear in the night.

Guidance teachers as we know them are absent, and issues of privacy and demarcation prevent information being readily exchanged and consequent support being dedicated. Kiita is here as a safety net, a secure dynamic learning space, where teaching is experiential and centred on building confidence and responsibility. Personal success is nurtured, so the goals seem relevant to the student’s life.

The expert application of the craft of teaching is evident.

The visit is too fleeting; within a week we say goodbye, with much to occupy us. The benefits of the Polar Pairs project are curricular, cultural, experiential and developmental. It supports the aims of Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) and has huge potential. Alaskan exchange staff have taken CfE ideas as inspiration for development, while Aberdeenshire staff have borrowed the Inupiaq holistic approach to inter-disciplinary learning. Supported by Caged Beastie arts education, self esteem of pupils in both communities taking part in film and multimedia projects has been raised.

Living Earth are central to this success. Several schools in city and ‘shire are now participating. But where do we go from here? Jamie is certain of its potential. “Having worked in development projects in the past, I have been aware of the obstacles to sustainability of such projects, particularly maintaining communication when personalities move from place to place, but the fact that the trip still gives me food for thought and impacts on our curriculum and pupils after five years is proof of worth.”

Dr Joe Smith (Senior Lecturer in Environment) and colleagues have published Culture and climate change: Recordings.

The book is based on a series of discussions, available as podcasts, which maps out this new field in the arts and sciences.

Contributors include academics, communicators, artists and journalists, such as Mike Hulme, Tim Smit, Siobhan Davies, Roger Harrabin and Marcus Brigstocke.

The publication supplements the conversations with an extensive timeline, suggested readings and footnotes. See oro. open.ac.uk/29900 for more information.

University of Edinburgh Lake Ellsworth update In October 2011, a British engineering team went to Antarctica for the first stage of the Lake Ellsworth project, an ambitious scientific mission to collect water and sediment samples from a lake under 3km of solid ice (see The Geographer, Autumn 2010). Transporting nearly 70 tonnes of equipment, the ‘advance party’ went to prepare the way for the ‘deepfield’ research mission that will start in October 2012. Professor Martin Siegert, the programme’s Principal Investigator, said, “For almost 15 years we’ve been planning to explore this hidden world. We are tremendously excited – this is a frontier science project with engineering and technology at the forefront.” See www.ellsworth.org.uk for more information.

University of St Andrews Ice on the move In collaboration with researchers from the CNRS in France, Dr Vincent Rinterknecht is conducting a series of sampling campaigns in the Arctic, to track the timing of retreat of glaciers and small ice caps around Greenland. These ice masses have the potential to play a significant role in the forecasted sea-level rise by the

end of the century, but the timing of these ice masses retreat is not known. The use of multiple dating techniques, surface exposure dating, lichenometry and radiocarbon dating, will allow the team to build a strong and detailed chronology of the ice margin fluctuations, to better understand the dynamics of the ice margin during recent time.

Contact vr10@st-andrews.ac.uk for more information.

© V Rinterknecht

University News

The Open University

18-19

Winter 2011 -12

© R Schlappy

McKee presents at Scottish Housing Conference Dr Kim McKee was an invited speaker at a workshop on ‘Community Regeneration in Tough Times’, at the annual conference of the Glasgow and West of Scotland Forum of Housing Associations in November. The conference, which attracted over 200 delegates from across the Scottish community housing sector, included keynote presentations from Kay Blair (the new Chair of the Scottish Housing Regulator), and Nicola Sturgeon MSP (Scotland’s Deputy First Minister and the Cabinet Secretary for Health, Wellbeing and City strategies).

See www.gwsf.org.uk/uploads/ conf11/overview.pdf for more information.

Scottish Geographical Journal

The RSGS’s academic journal is available from Taylor & Francis on-line at www.tandf.co.uk/ journals/RSGJ or in hard copy. All RSGS members are entitled to receive the Scottish Geographical Journal for free. If you are not currently receiving the SGJ but would like to, please contact us by emailing enquiries@rsgs. org or phoning 01738 455050.

Making Connections

Share-Giving A gift of stocks or shares is one of the most tax-efficient ways to give to charity. Twelve million people in the UK own shares, worth £200 billion. If only a tiny fraction were donated to charity, imagine what a difference it could make! Share donations are exempt from Capital Gains Tax (so they can be worth more to the charity than to the donor), and donors can get Income Tax Relief on the full market value (so the charity can receive the full value, but at reduced cost to the donor). If you have shares that you no longer need, please consider donating them to the RSGS. Making a donation of shares is simple, though

the process may depend on the type of shares held. In general: - t he shareholder (donor) sends the Shares Certificate to the charity (if the Certificate has been lost or mislaid, or the shares have been ‘dematerialised’, the company’s registrars should be able to help provide the necessary proof of ownership); - t he charity completes a transfer form and sends it to the donor; - t he donor signs the form and returns it to the charity; - t he gift of shares can then be processed.

If you have a significant amount of shares, you may prefer to make a gift in a controlled manner over several years, for

personal tax reasons and to avoid any potential for a sudden sale to affect the share value.

If you have shares of a relatively low value (usually less than £100), or you do not know the value of the shares you hold, you may wish to consider donating them to ShareGift (www.sharegift. org or 020 7930 3737), which specialises in accepting shares that would not normally be economic to sell, amalgamating and selling them, and donating the funds to a range of charities.

Please remember to mention The Royal Scottish Geographical Society when making your donation.

See www.hmrc.gov.uk/charities for detailed information about giving shares to charities.

What Geography Means To Me

An insight into the life of a working geographer

Lorna Ogilvie RSGS HQ Volunteer

W

atching Old Faithful geyser erupting in Yellowstone – standing with feet astride the tectonic plate boundary in Iceland – sailing the fjords of Norway and Milford Sound, New Zealand – feeling anxious at the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze when told it is built on a fault line but “can withstand an earthquake” – skiing adjacent to the blue ice of glaciers in Zermatt and Lake Louise – seeing my hometown, Edinburgh, through its unique volcanic landscape – and having an understanding, through a geographer’s eyes, of the processes that created such landscapes. That is what geography means to me.

A love of the outdoors, particularly walking and skiing in the mountains of Scotland, led me into a pure science degree in Geography at Edinburgh University.

Whilst mainly specialising in physical geography courses, it also introduced me to meteorology and geology. Unsurprisingly, this then attracted me to Canada’s Rocky Mountains and Calgary

University, for a two year Master’s degree involving opportunities for bio-geographical fieldwork amidst amazing scenery and, yes, skiing too!

Understanding the landscape through observation in the field is the common thread in what geography means to me. The final undergraduate fieldtrip to Switzerland taught me skills of observation which over the years, subconsciously, gave me a rich understanding of landscapes and places as I travelled the world.

Fellow travellers and skiers are no longer surprised by impromptu geography lessons on weather, rock formations or glaciation, not to mention diversions to collect geological specimens next to a ski run!

During my ensuing career as a teacher of Geography and Geology, and eventually as Headmistress, highlights for me and, I believe, my students were undoubtedly sharing fun and hard work on fieldwork trips to Dorset, the Lake District and the Isle of Arran. Working together in the field at university gave me lifelong friends, and later as a teacher it allowed me the real privilege of getting to know the

young people I taught outside of the classroom, whilst developing their knowledge and enjoyment of the subject.

In today’s packed modern curriculum, the importance of geography is increasingly neglected.

As it becomes largely subsumed into social subjects, and is given a decreasing share of the timetabled week, it is physical geography that loses out. In a world where climate change is happening before our eyes, and natural disasters linked to extremes of weather are on the increase, surely it is time to raise the profile of the subject, not diminish it? Planners need an understanding not just of location of settlement in terms of flood plains and rising sea levels, but also of the effect of expanding urbanization on natural run-off and water supplies. Volcanic ash and weather patterns? Flash floods? Tsunamis? Earthquakes?

Increasing research into so many aspects of physical geography is vital, as is raising its profile with the scientists of the future in schools. I remain passionate about my subject and, through my work as a volunteer at the RSGS in Perth, I am so pleased to have the opportunity for continued involvement.

The

Geographer

Opinion: Slow Travel

20-21

Winter 2011 -12

Slowly does it Christopher

Somerville

“God, it’s so bor-ing, nothing ever happens here, no sex, no drugs, no rock’n’roll, can’t wait to leave this dump, man …”

Thus, my 15-year-old self, spotty of countenance and sulky of mien, mooching round the rainy lanes of the lonely village in the floodplain of the River Severn where I grew up. I mean – what was there? Some bumpy fields, a handful of old farmers, a big sky with birds in it, enough flowers to choke a hippy. That was it.

Over in Cheltenham there were birds of a different feather.

Down in Gloucester the flowers were braided in the hair of cool chicks.

Everywhere else in the whole wide world was shaking some action, baby. But not this dead end on the road to bloody nowhere.

Oh, ma-a-a-n…

I’d actually enjoyed a charmed childhood, though it took me a few decades to realize that. The Leigh was an old-fashioned place, a cul-desac village where no stranger came or went. Five or six farms, most of them little bigger than a smallholding; families with medieval surnames who’d been there ‘since time immoral’; a traffic-free road where I could trike and bike in complete safety; my friend Roo, as close as any brother, to go exploring with.

Those bumpy fields had never been ploughed since Plantagenet peasants furrowed them with the ridges of strip farming. The old farmers still managed their meadows the traditional way, Lammas-style, and that was why the sky was thronged with lapwings, snipe and geese, the hedges and fields filled with orchids, ragged robin, yellow rattle and cowslips. There were endless cider apples to scrump,

bullocks to tease and be chased by, old scrap-iron sheets to bend into rough boat shape and launch on the long-disused coal canal. Best of all, each winter King Severn himself would rise out of his bed around Wainlode Hill and stride across a couple of miles of fields to invade us, flooding meadows, filling ditches, islanding houses, spreading consternation throughout the grown-up world and anarchic glee among the village children, an unholy joy at the topsyturvying of everything, so acute I’ve never forgotten it.

Sometimes it would freeze, and then a twomile-wide ice rink would be ours for the gumboot sliding, and ours alone…

How fortunate we were to be growing up in this lost-and-gone place, so slow and safe and yet so thrilling, in an era when your mum would see you off from the door in the morning and expect you back home when you got hungry. Roo and I came to know every inch of those fields and orchards, the back path by the haunted house, the short cut over the rickety bridge. What it gave me, I see now, was a personal geography, a sense of orientation and a feeling for each tree stump and gate post. I developed a love of exploring on foot that I’ve never lost, and a cavalier attitude to wind and weather that’s brought me, at the cost of many soakings and touslings, closer than I’d ever imagined to barnacle geese and granite crags, snowy owls and midnight seawalls.

The funny thing is that I hated

schoolroom geography. I dropped the subject as soon as I could, and didn’t even consider until quite recently how it lay at the heart of everything I loved – rambling, flowers, bird-watching, wild creatures, hill walking, shores, rocks, map-reading, stumbling across remote places.

Then at last I understood.

Geography is the story of everywhere; it’s as simple and superb as that.

When Sat Nav and GPS directionfinding arrived, I began to see others finding their way blindly, nose-to-screen like techno-moles, up the motorways and across the fields. That wasn’t how I wanted to travel, fast or slow.

Researching Never Eat Shredded Wheat, I suddenly realized that it was landmarks, beacons in the landscape, that had guided me all my life – this dead tree, that smell of sawdust, this trickle at a ford, that farmhouse under the hill.

I’d rather keep my eyes open and my five senses on the go than have a Sat Nav voice tell me where to turn left. This isn’t bloody-mindedness, I think; it’s just the voice of my upbringing, telling me to look out for myself.

You never know what you might find, do you?

“The funny thing is that I hated schoolroom geography.

I dropped the subject as soon as I could, and didn’t even consider until quite recently how it lay at the heart of everything I loved...”

Christopher Somerville is a travel writer who loves walking and exploring at slow pace. He has spent 25 years writing and broadcasting about country walks and tougher hikes, life in remote rural and island communities, music-making, festivals, and the pleasure and delight of telling stories and weaving yarns. He is the author of Never Eat Shredded Wheat, a fond look at the geography of Britain, exploring its coasts and islands, rivers and rocks, cities and counties. Packed with facts and stories, anecdotes and jokes and ‘did-you-know’s, the whole book is delightfully illustrated with maps and cartoons

by Claire Littlejohn.

Christopher encourages us to celebrate the journey, and to arrive enriched and bewitched, with all our five senses tingling!

Book Club

An Anthology of the Finest Writing on the Arctic and the Antarctic edited by Elizabeth Kolbert and Francis Spufford This literary anthology, commemorating four centuries of polar exploration and scientific study, is stocked with first-person narratives, cultural histories, nature and science writing, and fiction. Contributors include Roald Amundsen, Beryl Bainbridge, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, Jenny Diski, Gretel Ehrlich, Tim Flannery, John Franklin, Jon Krakauer, Jack London, Barry Lopez, Fridtjof Nansen, Robert Peary, Robert Falcon Scott, Ernest Shackleton, Jules Verne, and Sara Wheeler. It is a memorable collection of terrific writing, and a lasting contribution to the debate over the future of the polar regions themselves.

In Search of the South Pole Huw Lewis-Jones and Kari Herbert This book traces our search for the South Pole, from the earliest encounters with Antarctica’s icy waters, through the ‘heroic age’, to modern-day extreme skiers and adventure tourists. Vivid descriptions from the logbooks, journals and narratives of pioneers such as Borchgrevink, Shackleton and Mawson, as well as Amundsen and Scott, illuminate this enigmatic and unforgiving region.

Modern explorers and travellers, writers and scientists, including Edmund Hillary, Vivian Fuchs, Ranulph Fiennes and Børge Ousland, explain what the South Pole means to them. Stunning images by Herbert Ponting, Frank Hurley, explorers and adventure photographers, illustrate the hardships of life on the ice.

World Enough & Time On Creativity and Slowing Down Christian McEwen Christian espouses the pleasure to be found in slowing down, both for the comfort of the thing itself (taking time to go for a walk, to write down one’s dreams, to read, to talk, to pray), and for its impact on creativity. With chapters on walking, talking, drawing, dreaming, ‘making space’, pausing/praying, and telling stories, she draws on personal experience, on readings ranging from literary anecdote and poetry to Buddhism, anthropology, current news, and social history, and on interviews with contemporary writers and artists.

World Enough & Time provides the inspiration for a week of creative retreat – art-making, writing, poetry and reflection – on Tanera Mor from 28th July to 4th August 2012. See www.wildtiles.co.uk for details.

Scott’s Forgotten Surgeon Dr Reginald Koettlitz, Polar Explorer Aubrey A Jones This book offers an insight into the vital role played

by Dr Reginald Koettlitz – expedition surgeon, geologist and botanist – during the ‘heroic period of polar exploration’. Koettlitz was one of the few experts in polar survival available to Scott, and his knowledge should have been a cornerstone of expedition planning and execution. But due to personal reasons and an inability to acknowledge Koettlitz’s polar experience, both Scott’s Antarctic expeditions were beset by major lifethreatening medical issues that Koettlitz had faced and resolved during the successful 1894–97 Jackson-Harmsworth Expedition to Franz Josef Land.

This well-researched account is enriched with previously unseen archive material, such as correspondence with Nansen and photographs relating to polar history during the period 1890-1916.

Mapping the Railways The journey of Britain’s railways through maps from 1819 to the present day Julian Holland & David Spaven

From early ‘waggonways’ through the steam era to today’s diesel and electric railways, follow the development, decline and revival of Britain’s railways, through a unique collection of old and new maps, commentaries and photographs.

Railways appear in almost every type of 19th and 20th century topographical map, from detailed Parliamentary plans drawn up for hundreds of proposed railway schemes, to Ordnance Survey mapping of the completed lines. Maps were produced as an aid to railway management, to promote railway companies’ networks, and to enable passengers to plan their journeys and to understand the scenes passing outside their carriage windows.

This book describes key events and personalities in the history of Britain’s railways, from 19th century construction of thousands of miles of track, bridges and tunnels, through nationalization and the 1963 ‘Beeching Report’, to modern-day expansion of the network, the Channel Tunnel and heritage railways.

Reader Offer - 33% Discount and free p&p Readers of The Geographer can purchase Mapping the Railways for only £20.00 (RRP £30.00), including free p&p to addresses in the UK. To order, phone 0844 576 8122 or email uk.orders@harpercollins.co.uk and quote the reference ‘RS01’. Please allow 14 days for delivery.

Offer expires on 31st March 2012.

You can help us to make connections between people, places & the planet by joining the RSGS. Please contact us at Lord John Murray House, 15-19 North Port, Perth, PH1 5LU, or visit www.rsgs.org

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The Ends of the Earth