The Impact of Isolation

Work to mitigate the harm caused by humanity’s short presence in Antarctica doesn’t seem to be a high priority. Indeed, evidence of that presence can be a strange form of currency for involvement in Antarctic governance discussions, with no indigenous people to push back against imperial desires, in contrast with the Arctic.

A French inspection of Australia’s abandoned Wilkes Station in early 2024 found thousands of rusting fuel drums and several hazardous substances. This prodded the Australian government into finally taking steps to clean it up, fifty-five years after the former US base had been permanently closed. In a farcical demonstration of Australia’s loss of focus on Antarctic matters, it emerged in 2023 that the country’s new icebreaker was too large to reliably fit underneath the Tasman Bridge in Hobart, Australia’s “Antarctic Gateway City.”

While states with a long history of Antarctic involvement are dealing with their past, relative newcomers are expanding their footprint. In the last year, both Russia and China have opened new facilities or research stations on the continent. This takes their combined total to sixteen, although six of Russia’s are currently temporarily closed; China is already planning another station.

One Russian base, Bellingshausen, comes with the world’s southernmost Russian Orthodox church, which doubled up as a temporary prison in 2018. After months of close contact, electrical engineer Sergey Savitsky, drunk on the station’s plentiful vodka supplies, snapped and attacked welder Oleg Beloguzov, stabbing him several times with a knife. Conflicting reports emerged as to the exact cause of this outburst, for which the victim eventually forgave his assailant, causing the case to be dropped.

An unattributed quote in the UK’s Sun newspaper suggested that Beloguzov had been spoiling the endings of Savitsky’s books. Alas, the original Russian report made no mention of this colorful detail, with one alternative explanation being that Beloguzov had offered to pay his colleague to dance on a table.

Regardless, monthslong isolation from anyone other than a small selection of fellow researchers and maintenance workers during the polar winter is no easy thing to cope with, particularly for women. Reports of sexual harassment and assault in Antarctica are common, with a string of incidents dating back several years.

There is much work to be done to make Antarctic research stations safe and welcoming places. Isolation complicates everything and makes combating crime in any form very difficult. For example, while levels of illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing are seemingly low, tracking one boat in the vast expanse of the Southern Ocean is complicated. Even when such vessels are identified, it can be hard to do anything about their activity.

In early 2020, the New Zealand navy spotted the Palmer, a Russian fishing boat, operating in waters that were closed to commercial fishing. When challenged, Russian fishing authorities provided evidence that supposedly proved the Palmer was several hundred miles away from where it had been clearly photographed. Russia subsequently vetoed the addition of the boat to a list of vessels fishing illegally.

Protected, but Still Vulnerable

Antarctica’s remoteness has a dual effect. While it can mean existing harms are not dealt with, the continent also remains largely out of reach, other than for scientists, cruise tourists, and the occasional idiotic solo traveler.

Donald Trump is yet to turn his gaze to Antarctica’s plentiful mineral and fossil fuel deposits. After all, the work of crossing the often violent Southern Ocean and coping with harsh climates and thick ice to extract such natural resources is more complicated than ramping up domestic production or attempting to bully Ukraine or Greenland into giving up theirs instead.

There is also a more formal obstacle, the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty. Article 7 of the 1991 agreement prohibits “any activity relating to mineral resources, other than scientific research.”

The protocol was the result of a significant compromise, after Australia and France pulled out of a plan to regulate future mineral extraction in favor of an outright ban. Parties to the treaty that supported tighter protection had to contend with the opposition of states including Japan and the UK, with the United States the most significant holdout. According to Hemmings, since the United States has shaped the Antarctic Treaty System from its very beginning, “the system is kind of structured in a way that would favor American leadership.”

Having agreed to the original terms, as Hemmings himself reported at the time, Washington insisted on a modification to the protocol in order to make it easier for states to withdraw. Thirty-four years later, he says, the United States is still unwilling to allow other parties to impose obligations on it. Along with seven other decision-making states in the Antarctic Treaty System, it is yet to ratify an agreement on liability for environmental damage in Antarctica.

Many of the problems facing Antarctica are the result of states hedging their bets. If they restrict their options now by acting decisively to protect the continent, they risk missing out on a future bounty. To complicate things further, there are several territorial claims to segments of the Antarctic continent that the terms of the Antarctic Treaty have left in a state of legal limbo, neither formally accepted nor rejected.

Norway, Australia, France, and New Zealand all lay claim to distinct areas, with the UK, Chile, and Argentina claiming overlapping regions centered around the Antarctic Peninsula, the area with the highest concentration of research infrastructure. This issue received no mention in the recent Antarctic report of the UK Parliament’s Environmental Audit Committee.

While the claims remain in limbo, it is hard to argue for the value of the “British Antarctic Territory” other than in a future scenario of rampant resource extraction. Russia and the United States, among other countries, reserve the right to make claims in the future, likely for the same reason.

Although such a scenario remains relatively distant, Antarctica’s connection to global climate systems makes it both a rich source of data and a highly vulnerable environment. The hole in the ozone layer over the continent was discovered thanks in part to research at Antarctic bases, and climate change is a colossal threat to Antarctic species and environments.

In this context, science is vital in Antarctica, and is generally seen as the source of legitimacy within the treaty system. There are currently twenty-nine consultative parties with decision-making power and another twenty-nine non-consultative parties. What distinguishes the former from the latter is, in theory, the fact that they conduct “substantial scientific research activity” in Antarctica.

Yet investment in Antarctic research is declining. While the United States was hardly steadfast in its focus on Antarctica before the last election, the Department of Government Efficiency cuts that have hit multiple facets of US scientific research have not spared Antarctica.

China replaced the United States as the most significant producer of Antarctic knowledge in 2022, and the latter will seemingly continue to withdraw from data sharing, given Antarctic science’s inevitable connection to climate change research. The United States has long been the most significant player in the Antarctic Treaty System, and it remains the state responsible for the Antarctic Treaty, so these are big developments.

Cuts to Consensus

Producing science alone is no longer enough to gain consultative party status. Of the top twenty countries with the greatest contribution to Antarctic science in recent years, nineteen are consultative parties. The odd one out, Canada, has failed several times with its applications for the status, showing how questions of international politics heavily influence the Antarctic Treaty System.

As the Antarctic Treaty System operates on a consensus basis, all consultative parties can withhold consent on any resolution, should they so wish. The public record does not reveal which parties refuse to back particular measures, but the general understanding is that the applications from Canada and Belarus directly conflict with one another.

Ukraine and others have rejected the Belarusian application due to the country’s involvement in Russia’s war in Ukraine, with the formal excuse that it does not produce science of sufficient quantity and quality. Russia has blocked Canada’s entry in retaliation, officially stating that it conducts much of its research remotely and thus should not qualify.

A similar proxy dispute is currently underway over the status of the emperor penguin, which the majority of consultative parties have been attempting to designate a Specially Protected Species. China blocked consensus in this case, suggesting that emperors are already sufficiently protected, in another demonstration of the difficulties the Treaty System must contend with.

For years, all has not been well in Antarctic governance, with states very happy to conduct climate research as a means of confirming their stake in the continent’s future, but far less willing to act on mitigating predictable harms. In view of Washington’s long-term influence over the Antarctic system, which Hemmings believes made it “very difficult to get climate change issues onto the agenda,” the Canberra-based researcher suggests that its effective withdrawal from Antarctic matters means there is an even lower chance of that changing now:

I think what you see is that because the United States is always the elephant in the room, that it has a chilling effect on other countries. I don’t think that anybody’s going off to the Milan meeting with any particularly progressive, or bright, or novel ideas. . . . If you take a country like New Zealand, or Australia, or the United Kingdom, they know that the US is in a mess. So do they want to take anything valuable to this meeting and just see it go nowhere? Or do they want to keep their powder dry?

These are all excellent questions. While avoiding the introduction of new measures may be a strategy to wait out a four-year term, it hardly constitutes a revolutionary remaking of the system. In order to safeguard Antarctica from states that are waiting to see who blinks first, such remaking may be what the continent needs.