King George Island should have good weather forecasts. It houses weather stations belonging to the governments of Argentina, Chile, China, South Korea, Poland, the Soviet Union and Uruguay. The meteorologists are not surprised if their daily measurements of atmospheric pressure, temperature and wind strength are virtually identical, because most of the weather stations are within walking distance of each other. However, their paymasters seem to find the effort worthwhile. Maintaining a base in King George Island, one of the South Shetlands group lying off the Antarctic Peninsula, is the cheapest way to gain entry into the club of nations that administers the Antarctic continent.
The Antarctic Peninsula is the continent’s Balkans, its Calcutta and its Mesopotamia. It is the most crowded part of Antarctica, accommodating permanent bases belonging to at least a dozen countries. It is the most politically tense, with three nations staking overlapping claims to its territory. It is where Antarctica’s first babies were born, and where its first – and, so far, only – shots were fired in military anger. And it is where humankind’s activities have had their greatest impact on the Antarctic environment. In short, it is the best demonstration of the successes and failures of the Antarctic Treaty, which has governed the continent for 30 years this month.
A visit to the peninsula in March and April this year suggested that the treaty is alive and well, although wearing thin in places such as King George Island. I was travelling in the MV Gondwana, operated by Greenpeace, the international environmentalist organisation. Greenpeace bought the Gondwana, a ship strengthened to withstand ice, in 1988 to supply its own Antarctic establishment, World Park Base in the Ross Sea, and to patrol national bases and other sites it considers to be hazards to the environment.
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This voyage in the Gondwana was not a dramatic one by the standards of Greenpeace, with no headline-grabbing ‘actions’. Instead, we were collecting information, first at sea on the activities of Soviet fishing boats and secondly on the impact of bases in Antarctica itself. The usual method was to warn the base by radio that we intended to visit, to land a small party of campaigners with interpreters to make a first contact and then to follow up with teams to inspect the base’s fuel supplies, procedures for waste disposal and impact on wildlife. Both sides were usually careful to observe the protocols of Antarctic behaviour. Greenpeace’s inspectors had instructions to stay out of sites of special scientific interest and not to enter buildings without permission. The personnel at the base, in turn, were always polite and usually hospitable: we drank Chilean wine and ate spicy Chinese noodles and British Spam sandwiches. The Americans served coffee; the Russians apologised for having run out of food.
A glance at the atlas shows why the peninsula houses such a mix of nationalities. Much of it lies outside the Antarctic Circle, reaching almost 10 degrees further north than anywhere else on the continent. This makes for a relatively benign, maritime climate, which Antarctic veterans deride as the ‘banana belt’ – although winter temperatures may fall to -35 °C and winds lash at 300 kilometres per hour. The peninsula is also the part of Antarctica closest to an inhabited land, the island of Tierra del Fuego, partitioned between Argentina and Chile in a rivalry that extends down to the South Pole.
The first nation to lay formal claim to the peninsula was Britain. In July 1908, as the age of empire building drew to a close, the British government placed under the governorship of the Falkland Islands a slice of territory south of 50 degrees latitude and between 20 degrees and 80 degrees West in longitude. Old-timers still refer to Britons in Antarctica as Fids, for Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey, predecessor of the British Antarctic Survey. However, the country with the longest record of continuous activity in the area is Argentina, which has operated a base in the South Orkney Islands since 1904. This base, Orcadas, was a gift from a Scottish expedition, which turned the facilities over to Buenos Aires when London, preoccupied with its own Antarctic programme, rather snootily declined the offer. In 1942, Argentina laid formal claim to a wedge-shaped piece of Antarctica south of 60 degrees latitude, between 25 degrees and 74 degrees West, all of which fell within the British claim.
Meanwhile, in 1940, the government of Chile cited the Pope’s division of the New World between Spain and Portugal in 1494 to support an overlapping claim, of between 55 degrees and 90 degrees West, which includes the Antarctic Peninsula.
The three claimants have coexisted ever since in a curious blend of cooperation and confrontation. During the 1940s and 1950s, tensions ran high between Britain and Argentina, with each country regularly protesting about the other’s ‘illegal’ activities. In 1952, an Argentine soldier fired a machine gun over the heads of a British party landing at Esperanza, which the British call Hope Bay. Tempers cooled after the Antarctic Treaty was signed in 1959, freezing all territorial claims. Britain and Argentina even managed to cooperate in Antarctica while their armies were fighting for the Falkland Islands in 1982.
The Antarctic Treaty does not pretend to solve the issue of ownership. Article III, a masterpiece of diplomacy, says that a nation’s signature will not prejudice any future claim to sovereignty. At least two of the three claimants to the Antarctic peninsula, while sticking to the letter of the treaty, are still pressing their claims. We found Chilean officials the most candid. Like other Antarctic installations, O’Higgins Base, which the Chilean army operates at the tip of the peninsula, is officially a scientific station. But Lieutenant Diego Torres, fourth in command, made no secret of the real purpose: ‘We’re here to demonstrate the sovereignty of Chile.’ Torres enthusiastically traced his country’s claim back to the 15th century, when, he said, the Spanish colony of Chile extended to the South Pole. ‘Of course the South Pole was not discovered, but it was known to be there.’
It was Greenpeace’s first visit to O’Higgins and the Chilean hospitality was overwhelming. The environmentalists sat awkwardly on crushed velvet sofas as a waiter in mess uniform, complete with bow tie, emerged from behind an ornately carved wooden bar with a tray of coffees. (The waiter turned out to be a parachute commando, with more than 1000 jumps in his logbook.) A large formal portrait of General Pinochet as president of the republic decorates one wall. In the hallway is an ornately carved wooden box, containing soil from different provinces of Chile. The Chilean flag is everywhere.
Barely 30 kilometres away, the blue and white Argentinian flag is just as prominent at Esperanza, site of the 1952 shooting incident. A signboard welcomes visitors to ‘Argentinian Antarctica’. Another sign points out that Esperanza is closer to Buenos Aires (3970 kilometres) than to the South Pole (5200 kilometres). Esperanza plays a key role in the territorial game because it is one of the handful of bases that houses whole families, supposedly the forerunners of Antarctic colonies. Establishing permanent settlements is a good basis for a claim under international law, if and when the issue of territorial rights is unfrozen. In 1977, the Argentinian government took the idea to its logical conclusion by arranging for a woman to give birth at Esperanza.
This year, 40 people are spending the southern winter at the base: 25 men, all soldiers, 4 women and 11 children. The base is a neat cluster of huts painted bright orange, with its own church and a school in which the children raise the national flag before lessons every day. ‘We’re very proud to be here,’ said Monica Ballesteros, the schoolteacher, who invited us to her home – after telephoning the commanding officer to check if such hospitality was allowed.
Under the Antarctic Treaty we were free to wander wherever we wished, but the Argentinians quickly made it clear that they did not like the idea. Landing parties from the Gondwana soon found themselves shadowed by pairs of soldiers. The commander, Major Jose Martinez, said this was for their own safety. He politely received a delegation of Greenpeace campaigners, but said later that he found the visits a nuisance and of little value. ‘They come here, ask these questions, hand out their questionnaires, but they don’t offer any solutions.’ Nevertheless, he agreed to mobilise his entire crew to clean up an old waste dump that the Gondwana discovered – on the canny condition that Greenpeace did not film or photograph the cleanup taking place. He also turned down Greenpeace’s offer to help.
The bases of the third territorial claimant, Britain, were a welcome contrast, at least as far as science is concerned. Signy, in the South Orkneys, is the British Antarctic Survey’s premier biological research station and has a proud record of published work. The site is particularly rich in plant life, with 2 species of flowering plants and some 50 species of mosses. Gondwana reached Signy at the busiest time of the Antarctic year, when it was in the midst of preparations for the last visit by a supply vessel before the isolation of winter. ¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵs were furiously busy, finishing summer experiments, setting up apparatus for the winter and collating data from a season’s delegation work. Not wishing to get in the way of the researchers, the Gondwana did not make a full inspection.
Some of Signy’s research has global significance. For example, David Wynn-Williams, a senior microbiologist, is developing methods for counting populations of microbes in soil to examine how changing environments affect their numbers. In one experiment, designed to quantify the effect of global warming, setting up a plastic greenhouse over a patch of Antarctic soil caused the coverage of a cyanobacterium called Phormidium autumnali to spread from 5 per cent to 75 per cent in three years. Such precise measurements are possible only in Antarctica because the continent has so little diversity of organisms, Wynn-Williams said. ‘There are so few species that you can see what’s going on.’
The Gondwana’s crew was less interested in Signy’s science than in its rubbish tip. Signy is an old base, dating from 1947, and was built on the site of a Norwegian whaling station. Like most old bases, it bears the legacy of a less enlightened age: until 1990, all its solid waste went straight into the sea, at a place named Gash (rubbish) Cove. A diver from the Gondwana filmed the seabed covered with bottles and cans, many with familiar British brand names. The base leader, Nick Cox, said that Signy had changed its ways and now separates rubbish into different categories for burning or disposal in the Falkland Islands. The next stage in Signy’s cleanup is to install a machine to shred and compact paper waste for disposal. ‘It’s rather like smoking. Opinion has swung over what is acceptable and what is not,’ Cox said.
Signy’s special environmental problem is its lack of space: the station’s buildings are crammed against an almost vertical cliff covered with plant life. Today, the base houses up to 27 staff. The British Antarctic Survey is studying plans that would increase its capacity to 40, which worries some scientists.
But the biggest threat to the plants is not human but animal: a soaring population of fur seals – possibly a consequence of the boom in marine life following the near-disappearance of the great whales – is playing havoc with plant life. At Signy an electric fence keeps seals away from a 1000-year-old moss bank, perhaps a taste of things to come as competition intensifies for habitable space in Antarctica.
Today, this competition is at its most severe in King George Island. For many of the nations that operate here, the motivation is not to enforce sovereignty as to qualify for membership of the Antarctic Treaty and whatever future political or economic benefits this may bring. The island has obvious attractions for newcomers to Antarctica. Communications are unusually easy: the Chilean air force runs what amounts to a commercial airport, complete with a hotel and souvenir shop. The climate is relatively mild, with large parts of the island permanently free of ice. But, as usual, the conditions that encourage human presence also help wildlife and plants to proliferate. The island’s Fildes Peninsula, where most of the bases are, was listed to become a ‘specially protected area’ under the Antarctic Treaty until the debris of construction work made protection pointless. Part of the island now resembles a muddy construction site. The beaches, still playgrounds for elephant seals and penguins, are littered with plastic and glass refuse.
China is one of the newest entrants to the Antarctic club. It chose King George Island as the site for its first base, called Great Wall, which it established in 1985. When we arrived, 15 men were living there; in summer, the population rises to 33. Officials admit that they chose the site as a convenient way of joining the Antarctic ‘club’ rather than to contribute to scientific knowledge. ‘Because China was new to Antarctica we felt it would be easier and more convenient to build on King George Island,’ said Yang Zhi-hua, the base leader.
Great Wall base has the merit of being clean and tidy. As a new installation, it has not accumulated a lot of rubbish, and it was one of the few we visited to have an adequate sewage treatment plant. The older installations on the island are much worse. Teams from the Gondwana found medical waste dumped in the open near the Soviet Union’s Bellingshausen base, which accommodates 55 people in the summer. And a chronic oil spill pollutes the area around Chile’s Teniente Marsh base, which, like Esperanza, houses families.
In private, almost everyone agrees that the concentration of bases in King George Island is scientifically absurd. The commander at Bellingshausen, Vladimir Stepanov, said Antarctic science would be better served by the establishment of a single international centre to study the island as the border between the Antarctic and sub-Antarctic regions. ‘There should be no more re-inventing the bicycle.’ But he said the likelihood of this ever happening is remote, at least so long as Argentina and Chile continue to bolster their territorial claims.
At Britain’s Signy base, David Wynn-Williams had told us of a more practical initiative to improve international collaboration in Antarctic research and thus raise standards and avoid needless duplication. The initiative, called BIOTAS, for Biological Investigations of Terrestrial Antarctic Systems, seeks to produce a manual of standard techniques for biological experiments across Antarctica. ‘People are not obliged to use the recommended techniques,’ Wynn-Williams said, ‘but they know that if they do, others can compare their data and the quality of research will rise.’
But perhaps the most interesting approach to combining good science with national pride is to be seen at Chile’s O’Higgins base. Although the Chilean crew does virtually no research beyond meteorological measurements and a modest study of respiratory changes in Antarctica, the West German government has chosen the site for a receiving station to collect data from Europe’s new remote sensing satellite, ERS-1. The spacecraft is mapping the Antarctic icecap with radar, and a receiving station in the area is essential because the satellite must transmit its data immediately at the rate of 105 megabits per second. In the past, this might have been the excuse for a new national base. Instead, the Germans chose to build the station at O’Higgins. ‘We didn’t want to put up yet another Antarctic base,’ said Klaus Reiniger of the German Research Institute for Aerospace at Oberpfaffenhofen, near Munich. ‘O’Higgins is already here, it has its infrastructure and already has its effect on the environment.’
Despite visible signs of changing attitudes, humanity is still making a mess in Antarctica. Perhaps the most disturbing of the Gondwana’s findings were the numerous abandoned bases on the peninsula. The derelict British installation at Port Lockroy was particularly squalid, and an abandoned Chilean base, Gonzalez Videla, came a close second.
Opinion worldwide seems to be moving towards Greenpeace’s aim of turning Antarctica into a world park. The most dramatic sign of change was the decision in April by the members of the Antarctic Treaty to throw out a painstakingly drawn-up protocol for extracting minerals and to replace it with a 50-year moratorium on mining. But the Antarctic’s scientists have still be won over, even though the environmentalists emphasise that ‘peaceful and cooperative scientific programmes play a central part in Greenpeace’s vision of a world park’.
Researchers who now have a completely free hand may see the qualification ‘peaceful and cooperative’ as an onerous restriction. Wynn-Williams articulated one common fear: ‘They seem to be saying: ‘If you are good boys, you can do science.’ A lot of scientists resent that.’
At the moment, Greenpeace, like the Antarctic Treaty, stays clear of the debate by not passing judgment on any base’s contribution to science. ‘We are concentrating on getting the really blatant stuff cleaned up first before going down to the fine points about how much science is being done on a base,’ said Janet Dalziell, a campaigner on the Gondwana. But activists admit that there is a certain unfairness in this policy. Any Antarctic base, Greenpeace’s included, has some impact on the environment. If the base is adding to scientific knowledge, this may be acceptable. If it exists merely to fly a flag, it is not.
Part of the trouble is that Green-peace, again like the Antarctic Treaty, has to tread carefully on the issue of national sovereignty which blights the peninsula. ‘Territorial claims are one of the realities of operating in the Antarctic,’ Dalziell said. ‘It’s a losing battle to get them to leave and there are more important battles to be fought.’ As a concession to South American sentiment, Greenpeace’s Spanish-language propaganda talks of a ‘natural park’ rather than a ‘world park’. ‘We don’t care who runs it as long as the environment is protected,’ Dalziell said.
The final test Greenpeace must face is whether its own activities in Antarctica are worth the inevitable impact they have on the environment. Despite Greenpeace’s anarchistic public image, the Gondwana’s crew members carried out their duties with disciplined professionalism. The ship’s captain, Arne Sorensen, can claim 25 years of polar experience and first mate Bob Graham – like all the mates, an experienced ship’s master – first sailed the southern oceans in the 1960s. Both communicate a deep knowledge of Antarctica and a love for its natural environment. Equally impressive is the motivation of the crew, particularly the younger volunteer deck hands. There were high spirits, but no horseplay and certainly no carelessness with litter or in the presence of wildlife. The only accidental spillage during the trip, the leak of perhaps half a litre of two-stroke fuel from an outboard motor, was treated with the utmost seriousness.
Despite such efforts, Greenpeace cannot claim that it leaves the Antarctic unscathed: the Gondwana, for example, discharges only partially treated sewage. Even the most careful boat drivers and helicopter pilots must cause some alarm to wildlife. And any ship operating in pack ice runs the risk of being caught and crushed, with pollution the inevitable result.
What has Greenpeace’s Antarctic campaign, which costs about $1.5 million a year, achieved? Governments tend to deny that they change their policies because of Greenpeace ‘actions’. But the organisation must deserve some credit for its part in creating, virtually from scratch, a public lobby that has caused governments to take notice of the Antarctic environment and to move towards the ‘world park’. Whether this turns out to be a good idea remains to be seen.
Most of the Gondwana’s crew saw the issue in more immediate terms. If their scrutiny had persuaded a base mechanic to take more care in piping fuel, or if they had shamed a government into removing a rubbish tip, that was enough. For the moment, so long as the Antarctic Treaty lacks any mechanism for enforcing environmental protection, Greenpeace is the best watchdog Antarctica has got.
Michael Cross is a freelance journalist