Abstract
1956: Snowbound oil tanker at Point Mooring, McMurdo Sound, during Operation Deepfreeze, which helped support the International Geophysical Year in 1957–58.
The ship was to leave for Antarctica on a Thursday, but a formidable storm in the Drake Passage had delayed her previous cruise. She'd taken a pounding from 40-foot swells–and from the 50-knot winds that orbit the Earth unimpeded by land masses in these latitudes. Our departure was initially delayed until Monday and, later, by another day and a half to secure some last-minute supplies.
With a few days to kill in Punta Arenas, near the southern tip of Chile, I went looking for signs of Antarctic nationalism. Chile, after all, is one of the more hotheaded of the seven claimants to territory on the frozen continent. Britain, France, New Zealand, Australia, Norway, and Argentina all claim pie-shaped–and overlapping–slices of the continent. The region I was headed for–the Antarctic Peninsula–is simultaneously claimed by Britain, Chile, and Argentina, and occupied by science missions from another eight nations, including the United States. Trying to enforce a claim would be a tricky business.
The Territorio Chileno Antártico encompasses one and a quarter million square kilometers–nearly twice that of Chile proper. To strengthen their claim, the Chileans have even flown pregnant women down to their Antarctic bases so they could obligingly give birth to native Antarcticans. At Presidente Eduardo Frei Montalva Station on King George Island, they've built a gravel airstrip to which commercial airliners flew for a time, an 80-bed hotel, a large apartment complex, a supermarket, a bank, a school, and a post office. Families are encouraged to live at Frei, and their children often greet visitors from the increasing number of tourist ships that visit the frozen continent.
With all these efforts to integrate Frei with the rest of Chile, I expected to find some signs in Punta Arenas of Chile's claims in Antarctica. A modest frontier town on the chilly Straits of Magellan, Punta Arenas is the administrative capital of the Chilean Antarctic and the main staging ground for logistical support to the ice-bound region.
But I was to be sadly disappointed. The trappings of national symbolism weren't Antarctic at all, but Balkan. A 1914 mansion south of the city park turned out to be the “Hrvatski Dom,” with a red-checkerboard Croatian shield attached to the second-story balcony. Down the street from my hotel, the “Club Dalmacia” occupied a nineteenth-century mansion with yet another Croatian shield hanging from its façade. The local gymnasium was named for a Croatian football team, and the flag of the new republic was on display in bars, restaurants, and shop windows throughout town. One window display included a bolt of cloth on which were hand-stitched the lyrics of the Croatian national anthem. I'd stumbled into an episode of the Twilight Zone: I was a Balkan correspondent who leaves Zagreb only to discover that Croatia has taken over the world.
By contrast, references to Antarctica were thin. Any map of Chile includes a small inset showing the wedge-shaped Chilean Antarctic Territory but, beyond that, nobody seems to give the claim much thought. Punta Arenas's sizable Croatian community brought their sense of national identity with them a century ago. But no one has relatives back in an Antarctic motherland–and only a handful have ever set foot there. In the end, I settled for a Punta Arenas coffee mug on which a pair of patriotic penguins stood at attention beneath the national flag.
International diplomacy has always done a better job in the Antarctic than in the Balkans, and the post-Cold War period is no exception. In the Balkans, East and West have had difficulty putting aside their differences even to stop genocide. But here in Antarctica our species is doing a better job. Twenty-six countries share the seventh continent “for peaceful purposes only,” primarily the pursuit of scientific research. The parties have agreed to protect Antarctica's environment, keep it demilitarized and nuclear-free, share scientific results, and inspect one another's operations. They also help each other out in emergencies and, increasingly, with day-to-day logistics. Far from being upset by the U.S. Antarctic Program's presence on the peninsula, Chile facilitates it by allowing the R/V Laurence M. Gould to operate from Punta Arenas. Aircraft from the British Antarctic Survey land at the city airport, and containers destined for Ecuadorian bases sit on the docks. New Zealand, Italy, and the United States supply their bases on ski-equipped American C-130s operating via Christ-church and the airfield at McMurdo Station. The same planes fly Russians in and out of Vostok Station, where U.S. scientists are given access to the deep ice cores Russia is drilling there. The science party on my cruise included British, Canadian, and Chinese citizens.
It wasn't always so chummy. Until the late 1950s, Antarctic exploration and territorial conquest went hand in hand. Britain made a formal claim to large portions of the continent in 1908, based on Edward Bransfield's alleged discovery of the mainland in 1820. More turf was claimed on behalf of New Zealand in 1923, prompting France to claim a bit of East Antarctica. Australia annexed enormous sectors surrounding the French claim. On the eve of war, Hitler dispatched an expedition to West Antarctica, intending to claim it for the Third Reich as New Schwabenland. But before they got there to begin air-dropping swastikas, flags, and claims sheets, Norway announced its annexation of the region.
These four claimants recognized each other's sovereignty, but the United States did not. Washington was biding its time: its potential claims overlapped European claims. During the depression, Roosevelt dispatched expeditions designed to strengthen the U.S. case. After the war, part of the Pentagon's massive inventory was dispatched to Antarctica in the largest expedition mounted before or since. In 1947, Operation Highjump included 4,700 servicemen with 13 ships, helicopters, planes, landing craft, and jeeps, and photographed 60 percent of the continental coastline.
The U.S. claim was enormous. Aircraft deployed by Richard Byrd, Lincoln Ellsworth, and Operation Highjump overflew vast swaths of never-before-seen territory. A special government committee dug through records in New England libraries and museums to piece together the discoveries of American sealing captains in the nineteenth century. A draft U.S. claim map from this period found by journalist Deborah Shapley included four-fifths of the continental periphery–from 35 degrees west to 13 degrees east.
But the claim, which excluded the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, was never made. After the war, Argentina and Chile made claims on the peninsula based on a 1493 Papal Bull. The Soviet Union announced it wished to be included in any Antarctic settlement, alleging that tsarist explorer Thaddeus von Bellingshausen had discovered the continent in 1820. It was becoming clear to everyone involved that avoiding conflict in the Antarctic was more important than determining who owned it.
Rather than announcing a claim, the United States threw its weight behind what was to become the 1957-58 International Geophysical Year (IGY)–an 18-month global scientific jamboree in which military logistics were placed in the service of scientists studying Antarctica, the atmosphere, and space. University of Chicago physicist John Simpson–one of the Bulletin's founders–was involved in the planning of the IGY: “It was a chance for the Soviets and the United States to demonstrate their capabilities to one another within a peaceful framework.”
The unexpected result was the Antarctic Treaty, a six-page document drafted in 1959 to extend international cooperation in the Antarctic region. The sovereignty issue was sidestepped entirely, allowing science and other peaceful practices to be conducted anywhere on the continent without enhancing or prejudicing previous or future territorial claims. The parties agreed to disagree.
Forty years on, Antarctica is increasingly regarded as the common heritage of mankind, even in many claimant countries.
“In this age of globalization and the Internet and so forth, the whole significance of territorial claims has been fading,” says Oran Young, who studies polar politics at Dartmouth. “They have an antiquated feeling about them, as if they're the politics of yesterday.”
“The treaty regime is more stable than ever before,” says Christopher Joyner, international law professor at Georgetown University. “In the 1980s, the partners were headed towards the exploitation of resources, which would have increased pressures on the regime. Now they've reversed direction to a regime patently mandated for conservation and environmental protection.”
This change of heart would seem to reflect both the change in environmental attitudes in the developed world, and the gradual erosion of national borders brought about by the emerging global economy. These pressures helped bring down an agreement that would have set the stage for Antarctic mineral exploitation. Instead, the treaty partners–which now include China, India, and Brazil–have created an environmental protocol that forbids mineral activities until 2048. It protects flora and fauna, strictly limits pollution, and makes environmental impact assessments mandatory.
Of course the claims remain a live issue, including a U.S. “basis of claim” that could encompass much of the continent. Sources say that as long as the United States remains engaged in Antarctica, other parties have much to lose and little to gain from a showdown over territorial rights.
And engaged the United States remains. After several years of deliberation, LC-130s have been flying men and material to the South Pole all season to rebuild the aging U.S. station there. Built during the IGY to deny the site to the Soviets, Amundsen-Scott Station acts as a spoiler as it sits at the apex of most other nations' claims. “Abandonment of the Station,” a 1996 State Department memorandum concluded, “would create a vacuum and likely result in a scramble to occupy the site, to the detriment of our position and the stability of the treaty system.”
So the United States stays at the Pole, sheltering the pursuit of ozone and astrophysics research in a squatter's town of geostrategic consequence. And the United States stays at Mc-Murdo, where it has built an entire frontier town to stage travel across the continent. And it remains at Palmer, where penguin and krill scientists occupy a station smack in the middle of the much-congested Antarctic Peninsula. Science, for once, is maintaining the peace.