Place names

The Arctic archipelago of Svalbard used to be „terra nullius“, i.e. under no country‘s national authority or souvereignty, but 1920 the Svalbard Treaty was negotiated, giving Norway the souvereignty while reserving unique rights of access for all signatories and their citizens.
Mapping and naming authority lies with the Norwegian Polar Institute.

Antarctica is a continent where many nations have been active in exploration and naming of geographical features. However, no single nation has to date claimed souvereign authority over the entire area, so the question of appropriate place names has to be agreed upon in the repective committees. Agreed lists of names are being published by the USGS et al.

Here is the link to the current online resource for Place Names of Svalbard:

http://miljo.npolar.no/placenames/pages/searchE.asp
This publication is also being offered as hardcover book, available through the NPI here.
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At the moment, there is no official download version of the last printed volume „Place Names of Antarctica“ (NSF publication) available on the net (as far as I am aware of).

The file that I am offering here is therefore most likely not complete, up do date or entirely correct. You will find that since it is sorted by „source“ i.e. the nation which has proposed and often also invented any given name, there may be duplicates and overlaps. Some „source“ nations chose to write descriptions in their native languages (including French and Spanish) while others have omitted descriptions altogether.

For easiest access, I recommend that you import the text file into any database application software or at least Microsoft Excel. However, you can also read it with any text editor, provided you set the „tab spacing“ to a value >30 to separate the columns.

Place names of Antarctica.txt

Here is the link to the current online resource for Place Names of Antarctica:

http://geonames.usgs.gov/antform.html

This publication used to be available as hardcover book, but is currently out of print and likely not to be reprinted. Instead, I offer a download of the last approved version (below).