Antarctica Is the Final Frontier for Great Power Rivalry
The geopolitical race for the Arctic has become a major talking point for the international media. Antarctica hasn’t attracted the same attention, but the frozen continent is also becoming a site of contestation for the world’s most powerful states.
An emperor penguin wandering near the construction site of the Dakshin Gangotri, India’s first research station in Antarctica, January 15, 1983. (Pavan Nair / Wikimedia Commons)
The unexploded ordnance beneath one of Antarctica’s many penguin colonies probably poses no risk to humans working nearby.
While this may seem like a crazy sentence to write, it accurately reflects the slapdash attitude with which human missions to Antarctica have been conducted. There were more immediate concerns for Antarctic expeditions at the turn of the twentieth century than noting down exactly where they had buried their dynamite.
Work to investigate the threat levels posed by leftover munitions from expeditions at Cape Adare took place over the most recent Antarctic season, as the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust (NZAHT) confirmed in an email to Jacobin. It had previously been planned for the southern hemisphere summer of 2023/24, but according to the NZAHT, the government agency Antarctica New Zealand was “unable to provide logistics support for the event.”
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