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A Souvenir of the CESAR 1983 Arctic Expedition

by John MacFarlane 2016

Historic Postal Cachet

A Commemorative Postal Cachet from the CESAR 1983 Arctic Expedition (Photo from the Nauticapedia collection. )

Polar Continental Shelf Project provided the logistic support and expertise to establish the camp. The Canadian Armed Forces built the runway necessary for the Hercules C-130 aircraft that enable bulky and heavy equipment to be used on CESAR. Technical and engineering support for the scientific program was provided by the Atlantic Geoscience Centre, Earth Physics Branch and Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory.

The 1983 Canadian Expedition to Study the Alpha Ridge (CESAR) seemed to establish that the Alpha Ridge is an extension of the continent from Ellesmere Island and hence there is a possibility that Canada may lay claim to the resource rights for the region, in particular for petroleum, according to the United Nations Law of the Sea.

The Expedition brought back core samples that contained three million years of history of the Arctic Ocean.

The envelope from which was scanned for the image was given to me by Denise Herlinveaux and was sent by her brother Ken who was a participant in the expedition.


To quote from this article please cite:

MacFarlane, John M. (2016) A Souvenir of the CESAR 1983 Arctic Expedition. Nauticapedia.ca 2016. http://nauticapedia.ca/Gallery/Arctic_CESAR_1983.php

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Site News: May 01, 2025

ANOTHER MILESTONE REACHED

The vessel database has been updated and is now holding 95,457 vessel histories (with 16,532 images and 14,382 records of ship wrecks and marine disasters).

The mariner and naval biography database has also been updated and now contains 58,599 entries (with 4,009 images).

My thanks to Ray Warren who is beginning a long process of filling gaps in the photo record of the vessel histories in the vessel database. Ray has been documenting the ships of Vancouver Harbour for more than 60 years.

Thanks to our chief Canadian contributor, Mike Rydqvist McCammon, for the hundreds (approaching a thousand) of photos he continues to contribute to illustrate British Columbia’s floating heritage.

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Thanks to John Spivey (our US contributor) who is in his 4th year of fact checking all of the entries in the vessel database, one-by-one. This has resulted in thousands of updates and corrections which might never have occurred without his intervention.

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