Multimedia | journal article
"Meteorological Service in Fifteenth Century Sandwich"
Minstrels (or waits) in the 15th century Port of Sandwich walked the streets at night and woke mariners with information about wind directions…
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Multimedia | journal article
"Ballast and the Tay Eider Duck Populations"
Deposits of coarse gravels which line the southern margin of the Tay Estuary entrance channel east of Tayport support a thriving population of mussels. Large numbers of Eider ducks, dependent on mussels for food, overwinter in this part of the estuary.
Multimedia | journal article
"Three Centuries of Whaling and Walrus Hunting in Svalbard and its Impact on the Arctic Ecosystem"
In this article whaling and walrus hunting and their impact on the environment is reconstructed. Annual catch records and shipping logs made it possible to calculate the original size of the populations and to reconstruct their original migration in the Greenland Sea.
Multimedia | journal article
"On Cattle and Ships: Culture, History, and Sustainable Development in Panama"
During the twentieth century, two different ways of relating with nature interacted in Panama…
Multimedia | journal article
"Nature, Progress and the 'Disorderly' Fitzroy: The Vain Quest for Queensland's 'Noblest Navigable River', 1865–1965"
This article focuses on attempts, some experimental but all ultimately unsuccessful, to render Queensland’s Fitzroy River suitable for large-scale shipping by constructing ‘training’ walls and dredging intensively.
Arcadia
Transforming Rivers into Streets: How the Nineteenth Century Scheme to Improve Shipping on the Vitava, Elbe and Danube Failed
In the second half of the nineteenth century, projects aimed at improving ship-based commerce by connecting various rivers boomed. One such project was the establishment of an Elbe-Vltava-Danube canal, which, however, was never completed.
Arcadia
Seeking Environmental Knowledge from an Inuit Shaman
British Arctic explorers lacked local knowledge of the environments through which they passed and sometimes consulted Inuit shamans, whose geographical knowledge was known to be extensive. One expedition to seek the Northwest Passage exemplifies how they supplemented their deficit with indigenous environmental knowledge.
Arcadia
Sounds in the Sky: Listening for the Aurora Borealis at Fort Chipewyan
Part of the scientific agenda of the British Arctic land expedition of 1819-22 was to investigate whether the appearance of the aurora borealis was accompanied by any sound.
Multimedia | film profile
Eisenfresser [Ironeaters]
An on-the-ground view of working conditions in one of Chittagong’s shipbreaking yards provides insight into what happens to large ships at the end of their lives, and the people who dismantle them.
Arcadia
Nordenskiöld, an Explorer and Scientist from the North
The Finnish-Swedish scientist Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld (1832–1901) conducted ten Arctic expeditions over the course of 25 years, from 1858 to 1883. He covered a considerably vast area: from Greenland and Spitsbergen to the Bering Strait. It is quite exceptional that a scientist of his time participated in such a number of Arctic expeditions in such a large area. His reports on the explorations, written in several languages, considerably expanded knowledge of the polar regions.