Abstract
THE Symons Lecture of the Royal Meteorological Society was given on March 21 by Mr. J. M. Stagg, who spoke on “The British Polar Year Expedition, Fort Rae, Canada, 1932-33”. The activities during the International Polar Year 1932-33 really constituted a jubilee repetition on a more extensive and intensive basis of a co-operative scheme of observational work in meteorological and allied sciences so fruitfully carried out by fifteen countries during the First Polar Year. As in that year, 1882-83, part of Britain's share in the new international effort consisted in equipping and maintaining a station at Fort Rae, a trading outpost of the Hudson's Bay Company on the Great Slave Lake, north-west Canada. The programme of work of the party of six, who remained at Rae from July 1932 until September 1933, con sisted primarily in obtaining as complete records as possible of the main elements in meteorology, ter restrial magnetism, aurora and atmospheric elec tricity; and the proximity of Fort Rae to the zone of maximum auroral frequency around the polar cap made the auroral investigations specially important. Methods of parallactic photography were employed to determine the precise position of the aurora in space. The information brought back will be studied in conjunction with similar data gathered by the forty-six other co-operating countries with the view of obtaining fuller insight into the synchronous large-scale events in meteorology, magnetism and aurora, over the earth and in the atmosphere up and into the conducting layers. A large amount of material is also available for the study of the interrelationships among the varied phenomena observed and recorded during the year's activities.
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British Polar Year Expedition, 1932–33. Nature 133, 490–491 (1934). https://doi.org/10.1038/133490c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/133490c0