Aasivissuit- The Great Summer Camp: Archaeological, Ethnographical and Zoo-Archaelogical Studies of a Caribou-Hunting Site in West Greenland, by Bjarne Grønnow, Morten Meldgaard and Jørn Berglund Nielsen

The Arctic is still in an early exploratory phase, with relatively few test bores for such a vast territory. It is considered to be a proven oil province, and most of the logistical problems have been solved. On this basis, probability figures for discoverable reserves are a standard tactic sufficiently realistic for planning purposes. Nassichuk’s revised statement gives a current viewpoint: In the regions that Stefansson travelled, the search for oil and gas has continued relentlessly. In the Arctic Islands alone, some 180 wells have been drilled and nineteen are classed as discoveries; ten are gas fields, four oil, and five oil-and-gas. Under anticipated economic conditions several of these are believed to be commercial, although the calculated recoverable reserve is less than a half-billion barrels of oil and 20 trillion cubic feet of gas in total. Undiscovered resources are expected to approximate five billion barrels and more than I00 trillion cubic feet. Greater potentialities are likely to lie in the Sverdrup Basin, to the north, where costs are higher. Within the last few years more than 160 wells have been drilled in the Beaufort Sea-Mackenzie Delta area with a discovery of about one billion barrels of oil and 10 trillion cubic feet of gas. This area is expected to contain nearly ten billion barrels and 100 trillion cubic feet yet undiscovered, on the basis of calculated estimates from comparable provinces and conditions known to exist here. That portion to the west of the international boundary with Alaska is virtually untested. The situation has been found to be relatively complex, structurally and stratigraphically. An average of resource estimates released by the National Petroleum Council of the United States gives about six billion onshore and 12 billion offshore for Alaskan Arctic recoverable oil. Comparable gas potential is 22 trillion onshore and 27 trillion offshore.