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.”
This would have been no simple logistical service. Cape Adare, the site of Antarctica’s first confirmed landing and earliest dwelling, is 730 kilometers from New Zealand’s Scott Base. Moreover, it is regularly battered by 200-kilometer-per-hour winds.
Antarctica is a hostile land with a governance system that is designed to ensure cooperation. Yet the impact of international hostilities is increasingly being felt. While a total lack of transparency to outside observers means we won’t know exactly what happened at the most recent Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting (ATCM), which ended on July 3 in Milan, for months, the biggest issues facing the continent will have likely remained unaddressed.
Alan Hemmings is an adjunct professor at the University of Canterbury’s Gateway Antarctica Centre for Antarctic Studies and Research in New Zealand. He believes that those…
Auteur: Huw Paige
