in 1997. Cambridge Arctic Shelf Programme (CASP) In 1975 Harland formed the Cambridge Arctic Shelf Programme (CASP) as an extension of Cambridge Svalbard Exploration. The objective was field and literature based geological investigations into key aspects of the whole Arctic and surrounding areas, financed by subscriptions from the oil and gas industry. In 1988 CASP was incorporated as a non-profit research institute allied to the Department of Earth Sciences, Cambridge University. Its prime objective continued to be independent research, publication and education, while it increased its scope for geo-scientific research to China and Antarctica and other areas far beyond the Arctic. In the year of his death in 2003 CASP employed some twenty-five staff. Information Management Harland believed in the importance of preserving information and making it available. From his 1949 expedition onwards he operated a universal system for numbering localities, samples and photographs, and this provided the central basis for much collaborative work. Observations and materials collected were the property of the group and belonged to University of Cambridge. A sophisticated information database, developed out of Harland's extensive library and filing systems, provided the cornerstone of literature based research for CSE and CASP. He developed Georecords, a system where pieces of information were regarded as standard units that could be preserved and handled in a standardised way. A series of paper forms were developed to support the standardisation of geological data extracted from the literature and geologists were employed to complete the forms. These data were then entered into a fully normalized database management system. Work using this system was extensively used, particularly in projects in China and Canada. Continental Drift Harland was keen on continental drift since reading Alfred Wegener as a schoolboy and advocated the theory in a talk to his school as a 15 year old. At Cambridge University he found an establishment that was hostile to the idea which was held to be inherently impossible. As a member of staff after the war, when the majority opinion was still opposed to it, he told students to keep an open mind: by 1964 models favouring continental drift became widely accepted. Spitsbergen was a key element in some of the earliest speculations of continental drift: attempts to make sense of the field data led to hypotheses which could explain the relation between Spitsbergen and Greenland. At the 1964 Royal Society two day Symposium on Continental drift, Harland