Polish palaeontological research in the Arctic

The Arctic is a vast area comprising the northernmost continental regions of the Earth: Nova Zemlya, Svalbard, Greenland and the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Because of their relatively easy accessibility, they are among the most frequently visited places of this region, with the Svalbard Archipelago being the most intensively used for scienti fi c purposes and the best-studied one among them. Poland belongs to the most active states conducting research in this area. The history of our studies there goes back to 1932, when three Poles, Czeslaw Cent-kiewicz, Stanislaw Siedlecki and Wladyslaw Łysakowski, organised the fi rst Polish expe-dition to the North, combined with wintering on Bear Island (Bjornoya). By 1939, three more expeditions had been made. The war and the next decade have been the only longer break in our exploration history of this region, but from then on large expeditions to polar areas have been organised on an almost yearly basis.The post-war scientifi c activity of Polish re-searchers on Spitsbergen (the largest island of Svalbard) started in the years 1957–1958 with an expedition organised by the International Geophysical Year Commission; 130 partici-pants represented 23 scientifi c disciplines. It was then that K. Birkenmajer rendered serv-ices for palaeontology by collecting his fi rst specimens, among others of corals (handed over to J. Fedorowski for systematisation) and lampshells (brachiopods), which S. Czarniecki offered to systematise. In the course of the next expeditions, lasting until 1962, meteorologi-cal, geodetic-astronomical and geomagnetic measurements were augmented with basic palaeontological studies. The effect of these ex-peditions was impressive, since they resulted in about 400 publications, including the fi rst Polish work on fossil Arctic organisms. They were lampshells, which were used to establish a stratigraphy for the marine Carboniferous and Permian deposits in Hornsund (Birkenma-jer & Czarniecki, 1960), later partly questioned (Birkenmajer, 1964; Fedorowski, 1965; Water-house, 1970). Intensive studies on Spitsbergen were launched in the late 1950s and they were con-tinued until the 1960s and 1970s; they yielded the largest proportion of palaeontological works. The knowledge of most of the fossil fau-na of the Arctic was largely due to the collect-ing passion of the participants of expeditions organised to the Hornsund area (Fig. 1) in the years 1958–1962. K. Birkenmajer then gathered mainly corals from Treskelen, and S.K. Czarni-ecki collected lampshells and bryozoans from the Kapp Starostin Formation as well as corals

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