Overarching digitalisation is producing significant socio-cultural, economic and policy changes in the European High North. These changes create new opportunities, but also challenges and concerns for people and communities living in the region. Digital development is guided by supranational, national and regional digital policies and is secured through national cybersecurity agendas. These frameworks concentrate on advancing overall economic growth and safeguarding critical information infrastructure and information security, but pay inadequate attention to the interests, needs and fears of people and communities experiencing digitalisation in everyday life. In order to generate a more comprehensive cybersecurity agenda, which focuses on human security and empowering people to influence the digital development, a research framework highlighting the actual ways people use, wish to use, or are unable to use information and communication technologies is needed. The focus of this article is therefore on regionally contextualised digital opportunities and threats as they may be experienced by local people and communities. It utilises insights of securitisation theory to grant people a say in the direction of digital development in their region. The aim is to introduce issues of human security to cybersecurity agendas, for a more comprehensive understanding of the societal changes that digitalisation generates.

This paper compares four maps produced by the Canadian government and Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the indigenous peoples’ organisation representing Inuit living in the four recognised Inuit regions (Inuit Nunangat) of Canada. Our analysis is based on publicly available maps, documents, and records and extends the rich existing literature examining the history of definitions of the Canadian north. Distinctly, our research aims to understand the different ways in which the Arctic has been articulated as a geographic, political, and social region during the Harper government (2006–2015) and the effects these articulations have had on northern policy and people. We find that the federal government maintained a flexible definition of the Canadian Arctic as a region when in pursuit of its own policy objectives. However, when it comes to incorporating areas outside the boundaries of Canada's three federal territories, particularly communities along their southern fringes, those boundaries are inflexible. The people who live in these areas, which the state considers to be outside the Canadian Arctic, are marginalised within Arctic public policy in terms of access to federal funds, determination of land use, and a sense of social belonging to the Canadian Arctic. Our goal in this paper is to demonstrate that national-level disputes over what constitutes ‘the Arctic’ can significantly impact the day-to-day lives of people who live within and just outside the region, however it is conceived.

Variations in multiyear sea-ice backscatter from the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) aboard the ERS-1 satellite are interpreted in terms of melt-season characteristics (onset of melt in spring and of freeze-up in autumn, and the duration of the snow-decay period, the melt season, and the melt-pond season) from late winter to early autumn 1992 in two regions of the Arctic Ocean: the northeastern Beaufort Sea adjacent to the Queen Elizabeth Islands in the Canadian high Arctic and the western Beaufort Sea north of Alaska. In the northeastern Beaufort Sea, the onset of melt occurs later, and the periods of snow-cover decay and the occurrence of melt ponds are shorter than in the western Beaufort Sea. These melt-season characteristics of each area are consistent with previous observations that the northeastern Beaufort Sea has one of the most severe summer climates in the Arctic Ocean. A model, which assumes that the backscatter from multiyear floes is the sum of backscatter from bare ice and melt ponds, is used to derive the melt-pond fraction during the summer. The results show that melt-pond fractions decrease from an early-summer maximum of about 60% to a late-summer minimum around 10%. The magnitude of the melt-pond fractions and their decline during the summer is consistent with previous, more qualitative data. The SAR model, which gives melt-pond fractions with lower variability and less uncertainty than previous data, offers an improved approach to the reliable estimation of the areal extent of water on ice floes. Suggestions for further improvement of the model include accounting for the consequences of wind-speed variations, summer snowfall, and freeze/thaw cycles and their effects on melt-pond and ice-surface roughness.

This paper describes the development of a practical algorithm for the classification of sea-ice types from ERS-1 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data. The algorithm was based on a combination of grey level and texture information in order to overcome ambiguous grey level values of different ice types. The problem of calculating texture parameters for windows containing more than one ice type was overcome by first segmenting the image so that only pixels from the same segment were included in the calculation of the texture measure. The segmentation procedure was based on the iterative application of a speckle noise reduction filter, and was thus crucially dependent on the ability of such a filter to smooth out noise without destroying edges and fine features. In order to achieve this, a modification to the sigma filter of Lee (1983b) was developed; it out-performed the sigma filter for a model problem. Two ERS-1 SAR scenes of the marginal ice zone east of Spitsbergen in March 1992 were analysed by calculating values of grey level and range for different ice types contained within raw data extracts. Although the grey levels of some of the ice types overlapped, most of the ambiguity was removed through the additional use of range. It was also necessary to test for the wave-like appearance of open water. The classification scheme was demonstrated to identify correctly most of the grease/new ice, first-year ice, multiyear ice, rough ice, pancake ice, and open water in the two SAR scenes, although there was some misclassification of open water as first-year ice.

Reindeer milk is used by native peoples throughout the Soviet North. This article describes how different groups use, or have in the past used, the milk in raw and processed form. After summarizing the properties of reindeer milk, it outlines a neglected chapter in the history of domesticated animals: the attempt in the 1930s to set up a commercial reindeer dairy industry in the USSR. Lastly, it analyzes the decline of reindeer milking among peoples of the Soviet north in this century.

Academic discussions around Inuit identity once focused on acculturation. These have mainly been replaced by concepts of adaptation to new living conditions. Yet, Inuit in the eastern Canadian Arctic still frame identity concerns around their land activities and are wary of becoming too much like ‘Qallunaat’ or southerners. This paper examines what material and non-material goods (for example psychological goods) Inuit seek from the land today in order to understand what traditional aspects of their relationships with the land persist and what new ones might have emerged recently. It then discusses the implications these have for Inuit identity. The study found a decrease in the procurement and use of material goods from the land compared with previous generations. Concomitantly, the acquisition of non-material goods has become more formalised and distinctly identified in discussions of land excursions. The non-material goods are clearly linked to Inuit ideology and traditions, rather than to southern ideas. The desire for, and acquisition of, non-material goods is developing both from a top-down or group consensus and bottom-up or individual decision, illustrating an interplay between the construction of group and individual identities in relation to the land. Inuit in the eastern Canadian Arctic are transforming their relationship with the land in a way that demonstrates an emerging identity as community Inuit who are rooted in their own local history and geography and also consciously subscribe to a larger Inuit culture that is premised on values such as sharing and building harmonious relationships.

In 1968, the British/Swedish architect Ralph Erskine published an article ‘Architecture and town planning in the north’ in this journal, in which he called for a particular Arctic approach to the design of buildings and cities that is distinct from mainstream architecture due to conditions such as harsh climate, resident indigenous or sparse population and remoteness. One hundred years after his birth (in 1914), Erskine is still considered the authoritative ‘Arctic architect’, and his approach is paradigmatic among many architects dealing with the built environment in the Arctic, sub-Arctic and northern regions.

However, a study of the literature on architectural practice and the built environment in the north reveals a number of varying conceptions of Arctic architecture. These different perspectives are social in nature and construct the architectural technologies, the natural environment and society in different configurations. This article finds that architectural discourses and readings of the Arctic change under the influence of social, cultural, political and architectural paradigms. The perspectives identified in the article are seen to be critical supplements to Erskine's utopian approach to developing new sustainable forms of urbanism and architecture in the Arctic. They also reveal that new conceptions do not necessarily replace previous ones but often overlap and place earlier ideas into fresh concepts and that certain conceptions appear to perpetuate over the decades, such as the Arctic as an ‘empty space’. The thinking on Arctic futures is, in many ways, trapped in certain modernist and utopian modes, and this article contributes to widening the range of possible relationships between people and the Arctic environment, using architecture as an aperture.

The Finnish reindeer-herding area lies in the northern boreal forest zone. The herding area is divided into 57 reindeer management districts with a total area of 114,355 km2 (excluding water areas). The official number of reindeer in the year 1992 was 263,789, or 2.3 reindeer per square kilometre. In 1946 the density was only about one reindeer per square kilometre. The increased pressure on the mid-winter lichen pastures has reduced the volume of lichen. Also the decreased area of old coniferous forests with arboreal lichens has diminished the supply of food during the late-winter months. The lack of suitable winter pastures has led to the need for supplementary feeding with hay.

The intention of this study was to develop and test methods for cost-effective reindeer range land inventory and to assess the present state of pastures in seven districts. Use was made of Landsat 5 TM satellite imagery that was processed with remote sensing and GIS software. The analysis of well-known field sites proved the image classification to be between 80 and 90% accurate. By comparing field data and classification results, estimates can be made on the available fodder reserves in the different pasture types. The results show that mid-winter pastures are both scarce and degraded in six of the seven areas investigated. Only one area (Muotkatunturi) has mid-winter pastures in reasonably good condition. Late-winter pastures with arboreal lichens are more widespread than mid-winter pastures and determine the amount of additional winter feeding required. Summer pastures are abundant in all seven reindeer-herding districts and are therefore not a limiting factor. The method used is objective, inexpensive, and fast when compared to conventional methods. Information can be produced on the quantity and quality of reindeer pastures. This knowledge can be used to make better estimates of the natural grazing capacity of reindeer districts in Finland.

An area of Arctic vegetation on Brøggerhalvøya in the northwestern part of Spitsbergen, was studied. A classified Landsat-TM image with 57 land-cover classes (LCCs) was compared to an existing vegetation map with a comparison matrix. The 57 LCCs were grouped in seven different groups, where the seventh group contained 15 LCCs with vegetation. The other groups were regarded as non-vegetated. The correspondence between the existing vegetation map and the satellite-based vegetation map was not high, but the classes from the satellite-based land-cover map could be interpreted in botanical terms. A vegetation index (VI) was used to discriminate between vegetated and non-vegetated LCCs. The VI was correlated to plant biomass measurements, and the total plant biomass for Brøggerhalvøya was estimated. The estimated biomass coincided with other estimates from the same area.

South Georgia, one of the Dependencies of the Falkland Islands, lies in the South Atlantic Ocean between lats. 53° 50′ and 55° S. and longs. 35° 50′ and 38°15' W. The island is about 120 miles long from north-west to south-east and its greatest breadth is under thirty miles: it is heavily glacierized with an indented coastline and a backbone of high mountains rising to over 9000 ft.

An index of human ‘survival time outdoors in extreme cold’ (STOEC) has been developed, using body-atmosphere energy budget modelling procedures. The index, which is applicable in places like Antarctica where only limited climatological data are available, is based on the calculated rate of fall of core temperature from 37°C to 27°C of a standard inactive healthy subject in full polar clothing.

Applied to data from 12 Antarctic stations it indicates relative severity of their mean and extreme climatic conditions. The severest winter conditions become lifethreatening after only about 20 minutes. At most stations in winter, exposure outdoors for more than two hours would be dangerous. Conditions at all coastal stations in summer are mildenough to allow a normal core temperature to be maintained. The index has many applications, for example estimating likely survival times of immobilized accident victims and guidelines for duration of work periods outside.

Alaska currently relies on the Canadian Fire Weather Index (FWI) System for the assessment of the potential for wildfire and although it provides invaluable information it is designed as a single system that does not account for the varied fuel types and drying conditions (day length, permafrost, decomposition rate, and soil type) that occur across the North American boreal forest. The FWI System is completely weather-based using noontime measurements of precipitation, relative humidity, temperature and wind speed. The most common problem observed with the FWI system is in the initialisation and need for calibration of one of the moisture codes that make up the FWI system, the Drought Code (DC), which is representative of the deeper organic soil layers and has a 53 day lag period. SAR data represent an innovative tool to improve the current weather-based fire danger system of interior Alaska by initialising the spring values of DC, calibrating the codes throughout the season and providing additional point-source data. Using radar backscatter values from several recently burned boreal forests, an algorithm was developed that related backscatter to DC. The authors then demonstrated the application and validation of this algorithm at independent test sites with good correlation to in situ soil moisture and rainfall variations.

The Inuit of Canada's eastern Arctic are increasingly turning to tourism as a source of much-needed income and employment. The government of the Northwest Territories, in conjunction with local communities, is attempting to develop a ‘sustainable’ form of tourism in the region, with an emphasis on maximizing local economic linkages while minimizing negative socio-cultural and environmental impacts. One key strategy for increasing the ‘downstream’ benefits of visitor expenditure has been an attempt to forge better links between tourism and the region's arts sector. This paper examines some of the key issues and problems that face the implementation of such a strategy in the Baffin Island hamlet of Cape Dorset. It commences with a profile of the community, its arts sector, and its nascent tourism industry. It then presents findings from a household/business survey designed to gauge resident attitudes towards tourism and provide information on the links that exist between the industry and the arts sector. The data reveal that while residents are supportive of further tourism development there is considerable disagreement among different interest groups about the amount of interaction that should occur between tourism and the local arts sector. In conclusion, the paper outlines some approaches that may allow the linkages between these two important components of the local economy to be strengthened.

The subject of retreating global sea-ice extent is a matter of grave concern, and any new method that promises reliable information about past ice-extent parameters must be welcomed. However, the method proposed by De la Mare should be viewed with caution for four reasons. First, his predictions of sea-ice extent do not correspond with known observations of sea-ice extent from research published in 1936 and 1972. Second, his predictions correlate much more closely with the whale-sighting data recorded by Hansen (1936). Third, since Hansen's sea-ice extent data do not correspond closely with his whalesighting data, it must be questioned whether whale-based data should be used for retrospective predictions relating to sea-ice extent. And finally, information from the IWC indicates that De la Mare's datasets are not considered accurate. Predicting sea-ice edge extent is complex, and, it would seem, a purely biological approach is not necessarily the most accurate method to adopt.

The Yamal Nenets have exploited reindeer via hunting and/or husbandry in northwest Siberia for several hundred years, although wild reindeer have been virtually absent on Poluostrov Yamal since the early 1900s. Nonetheless, the region retains large populations of wild animals, indicating that nomadic pastoralists, semi-domestic animals, and wildlife were not competing vigorously for resources or space prior to industrialization. Natural-gas development is a relative newcomer to the region, but has already had a significant impact on the bio-physical and socioeconomic environments. The withdrawal of lands for industrial infrastructure, in addition to direct and cumulative impacts from three decades of exploration, has led to a serious decline in the quantity and quality of the remaining tundrasuitable for reindeer pasture.

Available records indicate that some preferred fur-bearing game species have been significantly reduced in recent years, primarily by non-natives. At the same time, it appears that extensive grazing by the reindeer themselves is having an overall negative effect on the area's pastures. Specifically, reindeer grazing is resulting in the thinning of the organic layer on well-drained ground and the exposure of fine-grained sands. The surfaces of these patches are highly erodable and unstable, therefore spreading easily as long as they remain unvegetated. The significant expansion of such areas is a genuine threat as long as, first, industrial development continues to degrade the land, and, second, the numbers of reindeer remain at current levels or increase.

The significance of the thermodynamic relations of ice and water within the paniculate and porous soil medium has been widely demonstrated in recent decades. The existence of unfrozen water along with ice at temperatures below 0°C, because of capillary and mineral surface forces, is responsible for the specific thermal, mechanical, and hydraulic properties of soils exposed to seasonal or perennial freezing. The introduction of a hydrocarbon contaminant into this dynamic porous medium has significant consequences for the thermodynamics of the unfrozen water–ice interactions. Techniques recently developed have allowed examination of microstructures of soils exposed to freezing. It has been shown that freeze–thaw cycles produce complex changes in particle aggregation and pore space distribution, which in turn affect soil water energy. An examination of the microstructure of a hydrocarbon-contaminated, frostaffected soil revealed differences in morphology from that of similar but uncontaminated samples. These differences are in turn responsible for differences in hydraulic conductivity between uncontaminated and contaminated freezing soils.

Wildlife observations recorded at several offshore hydrocarbon exploration sites in the Beaufort Sea were examined to evaluate the hypothesis that polar bears Ursus maritimus are attracted to drill rigs, will be judged to represent a threat to humans there, and consequently will have to be deterred or destroyed. When polar bears came south with the pack ice in the autumn, they approached drillships or artificial islands, probably because they became curious or were attracted by unfamiliar smells. However, these bears did not usually remain in the area.

In late winter, when most of the natural leads are frozen, the movement of compacted annual ice from east to west past permanent offshore drill rigs creates open cracks on the downstream side. Because of the open water there, seals are more abundant, more accessible, or both, and bears are attracted because of better hunting conditions. In mid to late winter some bears may remain in the area for several days or longer while hunting seals. This positive reinforcement may lead these bears to be attracted to other offshore rigs in the future. In the last five years four bears attracted to offshore rigs have been shot; thus the hypothesis was found to be valid. To date, the population is not under threat, but this could change if the number of offshore drill rigs operating through the winter were to increase.

The four polar years are used as windows for highlighting changes in the character of polar research over the past 125 years. The approach taken may be seen as one of an archaeology of knowledge. As such it fixes on four separate strata in the history of science and seeks to lay bare distinctive features in each of these. To simplify, the focus is selective, mainly presenting three types of aspect for each year. The first is the character of the instruments and research technologies employed in each, and the second is the kinds of problems tackled, while the third is the associated view or ideal of science that stands out. The latter aspect has to do with epistemology. The paper suggests that whereas work during the first International Polar Year (IPY) reflected an empirical inductivist philosophy of science, during the second IPY a mix of problem oriented, and hypothesis driven, approaches existed alongside inductivism. By the time of the International Geophysical Year (IGY) the theoretical foundations of polar research had grown stronger and much of the focus had shifted to larger scale geophysical processes. Finally, today's ambition to develop an integrated Earth system science reflects an ideal that is systemic, constructivist and predictive. Such epistemological features are evident in some of the most advanced forms of computer aided analysis of Arctic and Antarctic processes, as well as in visualisation methodologies used to interpret and present data, concepts, models and theories. This latest approach is evident in some of the planning and agenda setting documents generated under the auspices of the current IPY.

Longyearbyen, Svalbard, has become showcase of Arctic climate change. However, we know little about how these changes are dealt with locally. This article aims to fill this gap by examining climate change impacts and adaptation in a non-Indigenous “community of experts” and sets out to 1) describe observed changes and perceived societal impacts of climate change and 2) discuss adaptation measures and related understandings of adaptation. The research consists of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with planners, engineers, architects, scientists, construction workers and local politicians. The research finds that climate change impacts the built environment in Longyearbyen, and that there is vast awareness of and concern related to these impacts. There is a substantial knowledge base for adaptation, and a special trust in scientific knowledge, skills and experts. The interview partners consider adaptation as necessary and feasible. Adaptation is understood and implemented as technical responses to physical problems, rooted in a modernist understanding of the environment as separated from humans, who can control it through technical means. This suggests a narrow understanding of adaptation that might fail to address more socially transformative processes.