South Pole

by Elizabeth Leane

  Science has always been the raison d’être for human settlement at the South Pole – officially, at least. The first South Pole station began as a part of a planet-wide coordinated scientific effort, the 1957–8 International Geophysical Year. Over half a century and two new stations later, some activities (such as air sampling) have remained essentially the same, while others (such as cosmology) have expanded in ways that could never have been anticipated. The South Pole is the symbolic centre of the land variously called a ‘continent for science’ or ‘giant natural laboratory’. Yet all Antarctic scientists know that the science they produce, no matter how impressive, is a means as well as an end – a legitimate way of maintaining national presence in a continent where resources are still, in a sense, up for grabs. To understand how science became the ‘currency of credibility’ for any nation wanting a say about Antarctica, you need to understand South Polar politics.18

  Researcher working with an ice core drill.

  8 South Polar Politics

  Near the beginning of Ariel Dorfman’s novel The Nanny and the Iceberg (1999), the protagonist, Gabriel McKenzie – a young boy living in New York in the early 1980s – sneaks out of a Chilean resistance meeting to which he has been dragged by his expatriate mother. Rejecting her politics, he walks along the city streets and becomes enthralled by images playing on the television sets in a shop window:

  I allowed myself to dally there for an hour watching the same images repeated on twenty-five fractured screens, those mountains of ice floating on a sea that was black with waves, those caverns of snow and fog that I saw for the first time that evening, that soundless special on Antarctica that I watched, entranced, from the other side of the window. At that moment, of course, I had no idea that the Chile I had just repudiated had any connection whatsoever with that extraordinary forbidden world I was discovering and devouring with my eyes. It is only now that I see how ironic and fateful it is that on the very night I declared my unilateral independence from my country I was waylaid by images of a silent crystal continent that was part of the territory of that country …1

  Like Gabriel, many people assume that the Antarctic represents a complete escape from politics – a realm of pure natural spectacle, trammelled only by a small band of altruistic scientists. In reality it is a politically complex and contested region, subject to ongoing international negotiation. The Antarctic Peninsula – the site of overlapping and unresolved national claims by Chile, Argentina and Britain – is the subject of the most intense rivalry. Gabriel’s assertion that Antarctica is ‘part of the territory’ of his country is itself a disputable political statement. As the narrative continues, he becomes involved in a nationalistic endeavour (based on an actual historical event) to drag an Antarctic iceberg northwards in order to display it in the Chilean Pavilion at the 1992 Universal Exposition in Spain.

  While the Peninsula may be the subject of more obvious dispute than any other part of Antarctica, the Geographic South Pole is arguably the most politically potent site because of its symbolic value as the ‘heart’ of the continent. This certainly seems to have been the view of the U.S. government and its allies when plans were made to build a research station there during the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957–8. The station’s first scientific leader Paul Siple’s account of U.S. activities in the 1940s and ’50s frankly identifies ‘potential sovereignty’ as a significant motivation. Although initially reluctant for logistical reasons to build an IGY station at the Pole, the U.S. took on the task when, at a meeting in 1955, ‘the Russians dropped a bombshell’ – their own plans to put a station there. The interest of Antarctic hero Richard Byrd, one of the forces behind the station’s construction, ‘went far beyond the IGY’, Siple recalled. ‘He wanted it said, as did I, that the United States had done the impossible. A fierce national pride burned within him.’ However, when Siple, having lived at the station for a year, was asked whom it belonged to, his reply reflected the political complexity of the situation: ‘The U.S. taxpayers paid for the buildings, of course … But six countries’ claims intersect that ring of barrels out there on the drop zone.’2

  This strange situation was the result of claim-making in the Antarctic that, while incorporating events stretching back hundreds of years, centred on national exploratory and legal activities during the first half of the twentieth century. Many of the early explorers made gestures towards national possession of parts of the continent by flag-planting, place-naming and proclamation ceremonies. Amundsen, for example, considered the ‘greatest and most solemn act’ of his polar journey to be the flying of the Norwegian flag at his destination: ‘Thus we plant thee, beloved flag, at the South Pole, and give to the plain on which it lies the name of King Haakon VII’s Plateau.’ Scott certainly promoted his second expedition in nationalistic as well as scientific terms: ‘it appeals to our national pride and the maintenance of great traditions, and its quest becomes an outward visible sign that we are still a nation able and willing to undertake difficult enterprises, still capable of standing in the van of the army of progress’.3 Nobu Shirase’s quest for the South Pole ‘caught the popular imagination of a people … determined to show that their nation was ready and willing to take its place on the stage of world affairs’.4 His expedition marked their furthest south by raising a Japanese flag on a 2-metre-high bamboo pole and naming the surrounding snow plain ‘Yamato’, once used as a name for Japan. The official expedition narrative includes a stirring address to the snow plain itself: ‘Thousands, nay, tens of thousands of years from now, indeed for as long as this Earth shall last may you prosper as the territory of Japan.’5 Elsewhere in the continent a variety of other expressions of nationalism took place: Byrd, for example, dropped a U.S. flag over the Pole in his 1929 overflight, and other nations such as Australia and Germany undertook similar aerial flag-dropping exercises. These acts did not themselves translate into legal possession, although they often formed part of the basis for claims.

  Map showing territorial claims.

  The first nation officially to declare sovereignty over part of Antarctica was Great Britain, which in 1908 claimed, as part of its Falkland Islands Dependency, the region between 20 and 80 degrees west – roughly below South America.6 In 1917 it extended the southern boundary down to the Pole, thus claiming a pie-shaped wedge or ‘sector’ of the continent. By the end of the First World War, Britain was intent on eventually gaining control of the entire continent. During the following two decades the British Empire laid claim to two other sectors, one extending out from the Ross Sea, placed under the administration of New Zealand, and the Australian Antarctic Territory (AAT) in East Antarctica, which covered 42 per cent of the continent. Each extended to the Pole, following the ‘sector principle’. A crucial part of the legal basis for these claims was the exploratory activities of the previous centuries, including the expeditions led by Cook and Ross, shored up by subsequent activity in the twentieth century.

  Other nations did not simply stand by and watch as Britain advanced its territorial interests. Early on France had made clear to Britain its interest in a small wedge of East Antarctica, Terre Adélie (‘Adélie Land’), on the basis of Dumont d’Urville’s mid-nineteenth-century expedition, but did not define its limits until 1933. The sector sat amid the large area Britain had recently placed under Australia’s authority. However, given its own similar legal arguments, Britain had little option but to recognize France’s claim, which it officially did in 1938 after some negotiation between the two countries over which longitude lines should mark the boundaries.7

  Norway, unsurprisingly, was concerned about Britain’s claims, which encompassed parts of the continent discovered by its own explorers. It was only in 1939, however, to pre-empt a possible claim by Germany (the Third German Antarctic Expedition was then on its way south), that Norway declared sovereignty over Dronning Maud Land, between 20 degrees west and 45 degrees east – a sixth of the continent. This claim had little to do with the achievements of
its most famous Antarctic hero.8 The Norwegian government did not pursue its potential territorial interests in the area immediately around the Pole – the region Amundsen had named for Haakon VII. Indeed, Norway’s is ironically the only Antarctic territorial claim that does not stretch to the Pole – its southern and northern boundaries are unspecified. Norway’s decision hinged on its Arctic interests: because these would be endangered by a sector approach, Norway chose not to endorse this model in the south.

  This eagerness of European nations to claim a large slab of frozen wilderness at the bottom of the world is explained partly by the rise of whaling activities in the area. Antarctic whaling had been developing on a significant scale since early in the twentieth century, first from stations on subantarctic islands such as South Georgia, then through the use of floating factory ships further south. Whale oil had a variety of uses, including soap and detergent, lubrication of machinery and margarine, which also produced, as a by-product, glycerine, one of the ingredients of the explosive nitroglycerin. In the interwar period nations were eager to have access to this material, and with the Antarctic by far the most productive whaling ground at the time, this fed into territorial interests. Norway’s claim to Dronning Maud Land was based largely on the whaling expeditions to the region led by Lars Christensen over the previous decades.9 Nazi Germany’s decision to launch an expedition to the same region was closely tied to its desire to secure its whaling industry.10

  Norwegian postcard (1912) featuring artist Andreas Bloch’s impression of Amundsen’s team planting the national flag at the South Pole.

  Up to this point, all claims had been made by European nations, resting largely on relatively recent exploration and activity in the region. In the 1940s Chile and Argentina entered the fray, basing their claims on a different set of associations. Both pointed to a late fifteenth-century Papal Bull and subsequent treaty that had divided any newly discovered lands along a vaguely specified meridian running through the Atlantic Ocean and South America, giving Spain the area to the west and Portugal that to the east. Making its first official claim in 1940, to a sector to its south overlapping territory claimed by Britain, Chile argued that the treaty encompassed land down to the South Pole, which it had inherited from Spain. Another argument was its geographic proximity to Antarctica. During the years that followed Argentina also made a claim, which had a similar basis, but included geological associations and long-standing continuing occupation: Argentina had manned a meteorological station on an island in the South Orkneys since 1904, the oldest of any Antarctic base. The Argentinian claim overlapped with both Chile’s and Britain’s, the latter intersection adding to the existing dispute over the Falkland/Malvinas islands.

  There were now six claims meeting at the South Pole (the seventh claim, Norway’s, being unspecified in its southerly extent). Only one sector – about one-fifth of the continent – was left unclaimed (and still is). While the European nations, Australia and New Zealand acknowledged each other’s claims, they did not recognize those of the South American nations. In terms of international law, all the claims were weak. Papal Bulls issued half a millennium ago and geological arguments did not count for much in a modern legal context. Discovery and exploration were also insufficient unless they were solidified by permanent occupation of the region. This was, of course, challenging in the Antarctic. Britain argued for a watered-down version of occupation suited to the polar situation, based on ‘administration’ – the issuing of whaling licences, for example.

  Meanwhile, Byrd’s expeditions and flights had been colonizing the region around the Ross Sea literally and symbolically, with a series of bases called ‘Little America’, but no U.S. claim had been made. Siple, who had first travelled with Byrd as a Boy Scout, reflects in 90° South on the oddity of the situation as he saw it: ‘the United States, whose Antarctic explorations had uncovered more of the continent than the sum total of all claimants, had not raised its voice to demand a single foot of Antarctica’.11 In 1924 the United States had adopted the ‘Hughes Doctrine’, which insisted upon occupation as a basis for territorial claims. Accordingly, it recognized no other Antarctic claims, but reserved the right to make its own.12 In the next couple of decades it strengthened this right considerably, and appeared poised to make a claim on occasion, but none was forthcoming. There was a variety of reasons for this, not least that making a claim would mean recognizing others’ and thus foreclosing possibilities: ‘A claim could … diminish American freedom to move and establish bases anywhere on the continent.’13 In 1948 the U.S. suggested the possibility of joining the seven claimants to form a ‘condominium’ in which sovereignty was shared. This had the advantage, for the U.S., of pre-empting possible Soviet advances. For the existing claimants, however, this would mean surrendering their national territorial rights in favour of joint sovereignty; the suggestion was rejected.

  Given the unresolved and, in the case of some claimants, tense nature of this situation, it is no surprise that the U.S., if Siple’s account of the lead-up to the International Geophysical Year is accurate, volunteered to build a base on the South Pole largely to stop the Soviets from doing so. The Geographic Pole, however, did not have a monopoly on symbolic power – there was a range of other poles to choose from. France decided to build a station close to the Magnetic South Pole, which at that point lay in Adélie Land, about 320 km (200 miles) from the coast. The Soviet Union located a base (Vostok) on the Geomagnetic Pole, a point even more logistically challenging than the South Pole. While the location was ‘expected to be favourable for studying the ionosphere and the effects of magnetic storms’, ‘image and prestige’ were important motivations for its selection.14 To underline the point, the Soviets established another station – albeit a short-lived one – on the Pole of Inaccessibility, which seems to have had few advantages apart from the challenge it posed. ‘Both superpowers’, writes the political geographer Klaus Dodds, ‘were making a powerful political and symbolic point – claimants had no special rights in the context of international scientific investigation.’15 While there were scientific reasons put forward for all these ‘pole positions’, there were obviously politically strategic motivations as well, given that both nations, while making no claims of their own, reserved the right to a future claim over any or all of the continent.

  A signpost at Vostok Station gives distances to Moscow and other distant cities. The station was originally built on the Geomagnetic South Pole.

  The Ceremonial Pole is framed by a semicircle of flags representing the twelve nations that were original signatories to the Antarctic Treaty.

  While the IGY had seen an effective ‘moratorium on claims’, claimant nations were nonetheless nervous about possible encroachment on their ‘territories’ – a situation that intensified as the event came to a close. The scientific success of the IGY, combined with the complex political motivations of the twelve nations involved (in addition to the seven claimants, the U.S., USSR, Japan, Belgium and South Africa), led to the drawing up in late 1959 of the ‘Antarctic Treaty’. This document, applicable to the region south of 60 degrees south, declares that Antarctica will be used ‘exclusively for peaceful purposes’ (military activities and nuclear weapons are banned) and that ‘freedom of scientific investigation’ should prevail. While sovereign claims cannot be strengthened or weakened while the treaty is in force, they continue to stand: ‘all the claimant states continued to believe that their territorial claims were intact and fundamentally unchanged. Stamps continued to be issued, textbooks authored, and maps drawn’ proclaiming the various territories.16 The South American nations populated stations with families and children; the first person born in Antarctica was an Argentinian boy in 1978. However, these claims, recognized only by certain other claimants, mean very little in practice: under the terms of the Treaty, other nations can undertake scientific research and build stations on the claimed territory. Moreover, although the Treaty has no expiration date, it does not prevent any state from making
a new claim if it collapses at some time in the future.

  Norwegian and Australian commemorative stamps.

  Today, more than 50 years later, the Antarctic Treaty is still in force, although it has developed into a more complex ‘Treaty System’, with increased environmental provisions. The number of signatories now exceeds 50, with 29 of these (as of 2015) considered ‘Consultative Parties’ – that is, they maintain a significant scientific presence on the continent (something beyond the means of many developing nations) and have decision-making rights at annual meetings. The political landscape of Antarctica has become much more complex, with a far greater diversity of state actors, commercial interests (around tourism, bioprospecting and potential mineral resources) and NGOS such as Greenpeace.

  During these changes, Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station has been continually upgraded and expanded. The Antarctic Treaty has changed the nature of the politics – Siple’s frank nationalism would be naive in today’s climate – but has not stopped the politicking. A report to Congress by the Office of Management and Budget in 1983 stated that the South Pole is ‘symbolically and politically … the most important location for a U.S. station’.17 With the Dome Station becoming increasingly less viable in the 1990s due to accumulation of ice, the spectre arose of having to abandon the station if it were not rebuilt. ‘The costs could be substantial’, wrote Frank G. Klotz, an airforce lieutenant colonel, in America on the Ice. ‘Nevertheless, the United States must remain at this politically significant site if it is at all serious about exercising a major say in Antarctic affairs in the years ahead.’18 A Presidential Decision Directive in 1996 stated baldly that