The last wild place - Antarctica

E: The Environmental Magazine, Nov-Dec, 1997 by Kieran Mulvaney

Once Thought Protected Forever, Antarctica's Delicate And Precarious Beauty Is Under Threat

Antarctica is widely referred to as the last wilderness area on Earth, and with good reason. It is our highest, driest, coldest, windiest and most remote place. Visitors, explorers and scientists alike all testify to its devastating beauty. The vast majority of its great frozen expanse remains largely unspoiled, the way it has been for countless millennia.

There are about seven million cubic miles of ice in Antarctica, more than 90 percent of all the ice, and three-quarters of the fresh water, in the world. The average depth of ice on the Antarctic continent, where the average temperature is - 60 Fahrenheit, is 6,500 feet; at its greatest recorded depth, it is 15,670 feet. In places, entire mountain ranges, the size of Europe's Alps, lie buried beneath the surface.

But if Antarctica still qualifies as the nearest thing to a pristine environment on the planet, its future unsullied beauty is by no means guaranteed. It has already taken concerted efforts by environmentalists to prevent the continent from being opened up for mining, and a number of other threats are looming. Campaigners say that, incrementally, the pressures on the Antarctic environment are increasing as never before, and the environment's ability to withstand those pressures is in doubt.

"Right now, Antarctica is at a crossroads," says Beth Clark, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Antarctica Project. "Antarctica is one of the most fragile and - so far - unspoiled, areas on Earth. The choices we make now will go a long way to deciding whether Antarctica remains the last wilderness or becomes just the latest resource."

Delayed Reaction

The campaign to protect Antarctica largely developed in the 1970s. In particular, it was stimulated by the interest shown by international industry in Antarctica's mineral wealth: gold, uranium and other elements which lie beneath the continent's icy mantle, and oil, thought to exist below the ocean floor.

According to Clark, a latent interest in mining exploded in the early 1980s, following the oil embargoes of the previous decade. "Antarctic Treaty nations began negotiating a mining convention among themselves," she says. "Instead of trying to ban mining, opponents initially had faith that the technological obstacles to mining - would prevent any minerals exploitation from actually taking place."

The primary criterion for being able to join the Antarctic Treaty then was operating an established scientific base on Antarctica, and as discussions for a minerals convention gathered pace, so too did the number of nations suddenly wanting to set up scientific research stations on the continent. From a handful, the number of scientific bases on Antarctica rapidly expanded to a peak of almost 60.

"Some of these bases undoubtedly did a lot of really good research," says Greenpeace's Susan Sabella. "But for a whole lot of others, it was completely bogus." Built with little concern for, or interest in, the Antarctic environment, many of these bases had serious impacts on their surroundings.

A Sensitive Environment

"It is important to remember that the Antarctic environment is tremendously sensitive," says William R. Frasier of Montana State University. "The conditions are incredibly harsh, and plant life in particular can take many hundreds of years to become established, so that what might appear to be minimal damage in temperature zones can have very serious effects. Some moss beds on the Antarctic Peninsula have taken three to four hundred years to grow; a single human footprint can cause tremendous damage and remain there as a permanent record."

But impacts are far more severe than a few footprints. Vehicle pollution, dumping of wastes - including PCBs, plastics, solid wastes, food and batteries - the burning of fossil fuels, and even road and airstrip construction were among the human activities that suddenly intruded on this quiet world.

In one of the more extreme examples, pollution in parts of McMurdo Sound, near the largest U.S. base, was so severe that Greenpace likened the area to Boston Harbor. Elsewhere, worldwide condemnation accompanied France's decision to dynamite five small islands to create an airstrip - in the process killing penguins and other birds during the blasting, and also destroying valuable breeding habitat for eight of the nine bird species found in the Antarctic. (After several years of construction, the completed project was eventually abandoned in 1994 after parts of a nearby glacier collapsed into the sea, causing a freak wave which damaged the cliff on which the airstrip was sited). Compounding the problem, most of Antarctica's life - and the bases - are crowded onto the less than two percent of the continent that is ice-free year-round.

"Without doubt, the worst-affected place on Antarctica has to be the Fildes Peninsula," observes Sabella, referring to an area on King George Island in the Antarctic Peninsula, where Russian, Chinese and Chilean bases are found in close proximity to each other. "There are bases built on moss beds, fuel and chemical drums spilling over onto plant life, there's an airstrip, a lake being used as a landfill - it's appalling. Large moss beds of the kind that were found at Fildes are incredibly rare in Antarctica; this was a special place, but now it's a mess."