Dr. Matthew Ayre

Bio

I read for my BSc in Geography at the University of Sunderland and carried on there to gain a PhD in Historical Climatology under the supervision of Dr. Debbie Smith, within the Leverhulme Trust funded ARCdoc project. The subject of my thesis was the reconstruction of Arctic climate from the extant logbooks of the British Arctic whaling trade. Following this I moved to Canada to further my work into Arctic whaling through a post-doctoral position at the Arctic Institute of North America, University of Calgary. During my six-year tenure at AINA, I was able to fuse my archival work with extensive fieldwork across the Canadian Arctic and came to co-manage the Kluane Lake Research Station in SW Yukon. I was elected to the Royal Canadian Geographical Society’s College of Fellows for undertaking two expeditions to Baffin Island that successfully discovered the 1902 wreck of Scottish whaling vessel Nova Zembla. I currently work as a historian at First Peoples Law in Vancouver, supporting First Nation’s through specific claims research. 

Selected publications

Ayre, M. (2022) ‘Beyond Nova Zembla’, The Explorer’s Journal, V. 100, No 1, pp. 40-57.

Ayre M. (2021) ‘7 hours, a rubber dinghy, and a shipwreck: The search for Nova Zembla’, Arctic, V. 74, No 2, pp. 234-237. 

Ayre, M. (2020) ‘The Search for Nova Zembla’, Geographical, May Issue, pp. 61-65.

Ayre, M., Nicholls, J., Ward, C., Wheeler, D. (2015) ‘Ships’ logbooks from the Arctic in the pre-instrumental period’, Geoscience Data, DOI: 10.1002/gdj3.27