In the afternoon 20 May 1916, Ernest Shackleton with Frank Worsley and Tom Crean unexpectedly arrived at the whaling station in Stromness, South Georgia after completing one of the most extraordinary journeys in the history of Antarctic exploration. There are numerous versions of what actually happened on arriving at Stromness, whom they met and what was said during this first encounter between the whalers and the explorers. There has also at times been a confusion about which whaling station and at which building they arrived. Despite the discrepancies between several accounts dealing with the Stromness arrival, there has been little explicit analysis to try to separate fact from fiction. Despite some attempts to get the records straight, books and other publications on Shackleton still appear where details on the arrival are marred by fiction. This paper, therefore, continues the search for a “sober” narrative of what happened that afternoon in South Georgia more than a hundred years ago. A main reason to revisit the questions surrounding the arrival in Stromness now is the renewed focus on the Stromness Manager’s Villa that was finally repaired and stabilised during the Antarctic summer 2025/26.

Roald Amundsen’s South Pole party is routinely depicted as an unusually harmonious and high-performing team. This article re-examines that assumption by returning to the only contemporary sources that intermittently record interpersonal strain during the Pole march: the diaries of Sverre Hassel and Olav Bjaaland. Using a deliberately narrow empirical base and a transparent inclusion procedure, the study restricts all claims about friction to what the diarists explicitly note. A minimal coding vocabulary—task, process/authority, and relationship/tone—serves as an organising device rather than an explanatory framework. Seventeen diary passages document irritation, disagreement, reprimand, sarcasm, or social sanction linked to identifiable expedition members. Read conservatively, the diaries neither support a counter-myth of dysfunction nor permit inferences about the prevalence or long-term significance of conflict. They do, however, make one conclusion difficult to avoid: the Pole march cannot responsibly be described as frictionless simply because it succeeded logistically or was later narrated smoothly. Instead, the diary evidence shows that operational excellence coexisted with domain-specific frictions—over judgement, rations, navigation, role allocation, and tent-life tone—and that authority and contradiction repeatedly appear as interactional fault lines. Cohesion, where it existed, was not the absence of strain but a condition under which strain could still be written down.

The group portrait The Arctic Council planning a search for Sir John Franklin (1851) by Stephen Pearce is one of the best-known images associated with the Franklin expedition. However, the painting’s meaning and purpose have often been misunderstood from the beginning. Although it was a private commission from John Barrow, the Admiralty’s Keeper of the Records, the painting took on a public role as soon as it was completed, serving as a propaganda tool to garner support for the search for the missing Franklin expedition, in which Barrow had a strong personal interest. This article provides an exhibition and reception history of The Arctic Council, illustrating that it served as a propaganda tool at key moments during the search for Franklin and again assumed a propaganda role in the late 19th century, when British interest shifted to Antarctic exploration.

This article examines Captain Scott’s arrangement, announced on 3 January 1912, to add a fifth man to his Polar Party. Although it has been characterised as impulsive and ill-judged, primary expedition records suggest strategic and tactical rationales. Scott was deeply concerned about the physical hardship of prolonged travel on the Polar Plateau and sought to minimise exposure time. He also had a newly emerged tactical problem: the last support party could no longer keep up and might soon fail completely. Adding a fifth man would increase pulling power, allowing early release of the last support party; it would reduce time spent on the Polar Plateau, and it would provide a safety margin for worsening surface conditions. Secondary literature has focused on drawbacks such as tent crowding, increased cooking time, and ration redistribution. Such concerns are not strongly supported by primary sources, as many originate from the influential accounts of Apsley Cherry-Garrard and Roland Huntford, both of whom emphasised drawbacks while overlooking Scott’s underlying rationale. Drawing on diaries, letters, and contemporary records, this article argues that Scott’s fifth-man arrangement was a considered response to strategic and tactical issues at the time.

As Russia accelerated Arctic hydrocarbon development, year-round marine transport in ice-covered waters became a binding constraint. This article explores how South Korean shipbuilders – particularly Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering (DSME; now Hanwha Ocean) – became pivotal suppliers of icebreaking LNG carriers and ice-class tankers for Russian Arctic projects, especially the Yamal LNG Arc7 carrier program. Using a qualitative case-study design that combines document analysis with semi-structured interviews and secondary literature, it engages debates in Arctic political economy concerning the role of state–chaebol coordination in shaping industrial outcomes. The argument is made that Korea’s major commercial breakthroughs in Russian Arctic shipping were driven largely by firm-level technological innovation and industrial partnerships among multinational stakeholders – with particular analytical focus on Japanese and Chinese actors – which together enabled Russian Arctic projects to proceed despite sanctions, technical complexity, and environmental constraints. Throughout this process, state involvement remained limited in scope and largely followed, rather than preceded, these technological and commercial developments. The article thus highlights the limits of state-centric explanations and underscores the importance of firm-level agency and transnational industrial collaboration in Arctic energy development.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is exerting an increasing influence on Arctic governance, prompting Arctic states and the global community to develop AI technologies and engage in technological competition. This study examines Arctic governance in the AI era, analysing the opportunities and challenges posed by AI and proposing strategies for risk mitigation. We argue that AI offers important opportunities for enhancing predictive accuracy, optimising resource exploration, and facilitating cooperative governance in the Arctic. At the same time, AI presents multiple challenges: algorithmic bias may compromise the fairness of decision-making, technological dependence could contribute to governance imbalances, the black-box nature of many AI systems could undermine transparency, and ethical controversies and questions of public acceptance remain unresolved. Through transparent algorithm design, the establishment of technical standards and ethical guidelines, and the construction of multi-stakeholder governance frameworks, these risks could be mitigated to support more sustainable Arctic governance.

Since 2022, the Arctic region has entered a period of significant instability, which has placed considerable strain on the institutional frameworks established during the post-Cold War era. With the conclusion of that historical phase, the future of Arctic governance is being contested by Russia and the United States – two pivotal polar powers essential to defining the regional order. Following the return of Donald Trump to the White House in January 2025, both nations have exhibited signs of diplomatic rapprochement, despite deploying distinct strategic postures. These postures situate the Arctic within competing metanarratives, wherein the region becomes the subject of new political imaginaries that instrumentalise imperialism. While the United States has resumed an assertive rhetoric towards its northern neighbours, Russia is attempting to resolve its long-standing civilisational identity debate by positioning the Arctic as a new centre of geopolitical gravity. Confronted with the threat of a division into spheres of influence, this paper contends that the Nordic states and Canada face the challenge of addressing the fragmenting polar governance regime that is essential in the context of the planet’s rapidly changing climate regime and growing geo-economic competition for natural resources.

For over three decades, science diplomacy in the Arctic operated within a remarkably cooperative framework, often identified as “exceptionalism.” Circumarctic research was largely insulated from geopolitical tensions. This era was abruptly ended by the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the international isolation of Russia. This article, informed by the author’s history of engagement in Russian Arctic research and in science diplomacy, examines the transition from a unified to a fragmented research environment. The current rupture in scientific relations has created a crisis by disconnecting a substantial part of the global system – including several of the planet’s climate “tipping elements” – from many of the networks configured to understand it. This epistemic gap is compounded by a severe weakening of “soft-power” communication between countries that are poorly aligned strategically. While the fourth International Conference on Arctic Research Planning has provided a strong blueprint for Arctic research over the next decade, and the fifth International Polar Year (2032–33) presents an exceptional opportunity to implement this plan, the future of collaborative research remains uncertain as the research community attempts to move towards a model of conditional engagement in a multipolar environment.

During the early Cold War, Canada’s Northern Co-ordination and Research Centre (NCRC) employed anthropologists and other ethnographers to make Inuit legible to northern administrators. The government sought information that would demonstrate how well Inuit were adapting to life in the newly established and permanent government-administered settlements. Research in Iqaluit, then known as Frobisher Bay, was assigned to Toshio Yatsushiro, a Japanese-American anthropologist who had previously participated in anthropological studies of interned Japanese and Japanese-Americans. Yatsushiro spent two summers (1958 and 1959) in Iqaluit with the goal of documenting the extent to which Inuit were adopting the cultural norms, values, and lifestyles of Euro-Canadians. Although Yatsushiro never completed his intended project, his published and unpublished writings identify specific ways in which Canada’s post-war administration of Inuit communities and its efforts to acculturate Inuit to southern Canadian ways of living were failing Inuit. Archival documents, interviews with NCRC anthropologists, and Yatsushiro’s published and unpublished writings reveal his disillusionment with the authoritarian practices of government officials in the North. His ethnographic observations and recommendations, coloured by his own experiences of internment, were dismissed by government officials as inaccurate and irrelevant.

What kind of Arctic actor will China be in 2050? China has entered the Arctic, and its future ambitions in the region are closely tied to its future trajectory in global politics. We conduct a scenario analysis of China’s ability to realise its Arctic ambitions in three scenarios: A continuation of the status quo (Ascendant China), Chinese economic stagnation (Stagnant China), and Chinese global hegemony (Triumphant China). We find that climate change will affect China differently in these scenarios. In Triumphant China, climate change can act as an enabler of Chinese ambitions, particularly regarding fishing and maritime transport. Even as a non-Arctic state, a Triumphant China will likely wield sufficient global power to realise its Arctic ambitions. In Ascendant China and Stagnant China, we find that climate change primarily acts as an obstacle to China’s Arctic ambitions. China would rely on its Russian partnership to a greater extent, limiting their ability to realise their ambitions. Without a strong Arctic foothold, climate change could cause regional changes too rapid and comprehensive for China to be able to adapt civilian and military capabilities to those changes. Finally, climate change may make Stagnant China more likely, as sea-level rise threatens China’s economic might.