‘The Devil’s Ballroom’ was how Roald Amundsen described a part of the Antarctic due to its precarious and often deathly ice and crevasses. One hundred years ago this month, Amundsen and his Norwegian team became the first humans to reach the South Pole. Leaving many failed attempts in their wake, he struggled across 500 miles of ice to reach the pole exactly five weeks before his great rival, the British explorer, Robert Falcon Scott. Nowadays when we read or see things about Antarctica it is generally to do with one of two things...endless footage of penguins on shows like the BBC’s Frozen Planet or else books and documentaries about the Age of Polar Exploration. What seems virtually neglected to me is the ongoing experience of the people who actually live there now. At any one time there are between 2,000 and 5,000 people living in Antarctica. Most of these people are of course researchers and scientists. Apart from the work that they are doing, what is their experience of living in the coldest, driest, windiest and most uninhabitable place on Earth? My interest in this subject was first sparked a year ago when I came across an advertisement in National Geographic magazine: ‘Cleaner wanted: Antarctica. Please send CV to...etc.’ I had to ponder this for a while because I don’t think many of us see Antarctica as a place with real people. We are suffused with images of its extraordinary wildlife but surely people can’t live there...?
This giant continent, twice the size of Australia, was the last place on Earth to be explored. For centuries it existed only in myth. In antiquity it was known as Terra Australis (Southern Land) but nobody was totally sure it existed until a sighting from sea by a Russian expedition in 1820. However, Antarctica was simply too difficult an environment to conquer for many decades. In some ways it was the Moon of the late nineteenth century- How can we possibly conquer this strange planet, this ethereal netherworld? The great Anglo-Irish explorer, Ernest Shackleton once said, ‘I seemed to vow to myself that someday I would go to the region of ice and snow and go on and on till I came to one of the poles of the earth, the end of the axis upon which this great round ball turns’. Since the days of polar endeavour, Antarctica has become a vital centre of scientific research. Today there are several thousand people living there, mostly working in the various scientific stations. Most people come to stay for one summer (October to March) and one winter (April to September) but many will remain for two years or more.
Most of the people who work in stations such as Halley (UK) or McMurdo (USA) are oceanographers, glaciologists, climatologists and lots of other ‘ologists’. But of course there are plenty of support staff too like the cleaner mentioned above, cooks and technicians (to apply for work, visit the British Antarctic Survey website (www.antarctica.ac.uk/employment). McMurdo station houses several hundred people in two and four person bedrooms. Due to the twenty four hour daylight in the summer, the windows are sealed with aluminium foil. There is a large cafeteria which only serves non-fresh food due to the deficiency of any vegetation (the last supply of food for the winter season arrives in February). The rule in the cafeteria is ‘All you can eat but eat what you take’ due to the challenge of waste disposal. Because of strict conditions, waste is put in an on-site incinerator where the residual ash is collected and removed from the continent by ship. Many of the stations have a sauna, not for luxury purposes (there’s no spa!) but rather to allow the field scientists to warm up after their days work. The coldest temperature on earth was recorded in Antarctica in the early 1980’s: -89 °C. In one of the Russian stations there is an Orthodox church with a priest who works on a one year contract before being replaced by his successor. There appears to be a strong sense of community in these bases. Many of the people living there are separated from their families. This must make things very difficult especially since they are essentially stranded for the entire winter. However, the spirit of ‘everyone mucking in’ is what prevails. In Rothera, one of the many British stations, everybody must take their turn on night duty. The purpose of night duty is to ensure that the electricity supply to the computer systems that are engaged in ongoing scientific analysis is maintained. Most of the stations have pubs which, not unlike our part of the world, is where most of the socialising is done. In fact, in the British stations there is a semi-formal station dinner on Saturday nights which is the eagerly anticipated event of the week. In the winter season the people who remain onsite are literally closed off from the rest of the world. The last airplane leaves in February and physical contact with the rest of the world is impossible until October. Darkness pervades for twenty four hours a day for several months. This can have an alarming affect on people’s personalities, often leading to conflict. This lack of sunlight can cause a chemical imbalance in the brain called T3 Syndrome. Regulars to Antarctica call it ‘Going Toast’. In some cases this has led to clinical insanity. A doctor always remains in residence. Why do people want to live here? For most it is because their work brings them. For others like Justin, a former chef in one of the Antarctic stations, he says, ‘Having a compass to point 360 degrees offering endless choices of directions in which to travel provides comfort to those questioning their paths, indeed having a GPS makes it even easier to assess your whereabouts in our world. The big question is not so much where I am…it’s where I’m going’.
The most intriguing area is the Argentinean Base, Esperanza, located on the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. Antarctica is similar to the shape of a baby jellyfish. Esperanza is at the end of the ‘tentacle’. This appears to be the area of the continent that most resembles what we know as a village. Built in 1952, there are 43 buildings in total, including 15 very pretty orange and yellow houses. The South Americans seem to take Antarctic habitation more seriously than their neighbours as many of the scientists bring their entire families with them to live here. As a result there is a school in Esperanza with two teachers. It even has its own radio station! The motto of this base seems to sum up the whole notion of habitation in this strange place: ‘Permanence- an act of sacrifice’.
Antarctica is a very curious place politically. Who owns Antarctica? The Antarcticans? Well, of course there are and have never been any native people. Anyone who lives there comes from another sovereign state. In essence, nobody owns Antarctica. In order to deal with a continent that is so valuable but which nobody can lay absolute claim to, the Antarctic Treaty was signed in 1959. This document has now been signed by 48 countries. The treaty ensures that Antarctica maintains its function as a place of science and natural beauty, that nuclear and military activity are prohibited, and that mineral mining is prevented. Even though the treaty doesn’t recognise any territorial claims, there are currently eight countries which have ‘appropriated’ slices of the cake for themselves. Australia was greedy and grabbed the largest slice. Others include Britain, Chile, Argentina and France. Some of the claims actually overlap which has led to diplomatic conflict in the past. In my research I discovered that some countries have gone to extreme lengths to assert their sovereignty over their wedges of land. Up to 2009 there had been eleven babies born on the continent, all of them in the Argentinean and Chilean areas. Critics suggest that some of these births have been a deliberate attempt to embolden national territorial rights.
Because nobody has sovereignty over Antarctica, the legal situation is relatively ambiguous. Everybody must stick to the boundaries defined in the Antarctic Treaty. However, the laws enshrined in this don’t seem to cover the types of legal issues which would normally arise in a regular Western country, like theft, murder etc. Therefore, some of the eight countries that claim territorial sovereignty apply their own country’s laws to their ‘wedges’. For example, any crime committed within 50 kilometres of an Argentinean base must be judged under the Argentinean legal system in Tierra del Feugo, a nearby island dependency of Argentina. The United States places their own marshals in Antarctica to ensure that US law is upheld in the areas around their bases. Because there is no single system of legislature to govern the entire continent there have been some tricky cases. In 2000 an Australian astrophysicist, Rodney Marks died of methanol poisoning in Antarctica. It was deemed questionable as to whether this man was murdered or whether he took the poison out of his own free will. Due to the jurisdictional conflicts at play in Antarctica it was impossible to issue warrants for American witnesses to the death. Because it happened during the Antarctic winter, there was no way in or out of the South Pole so his body was kept in a freezer for several months until an airplane could safely reach them. It has been impossible to determine whether there was foul play or if a prank went wrong or indeed to reach any solution to this case due to the absence of an inclusive legal system. To this day nobody knows the circumstances of Marks’ death. The case has been closed. At the time, the media labelled it ‘the first murder in Antarctica’. If serious incidents like this occur in the future there will need to be an international consensus on a legal system for the continent.
Antarctica is an anomaly. It is the fifth largest continent in the world. Nobody owns it. It has no native people. People live there but not for longer than a few years. It survives politically on the international cooperation framework laid out in the Antarctic Treaty. As we see from the Rodney Marks case, sometimes this international cooperation fails to exist. It is a microcosym of the world. People from a diverse number of countries are working side by side, extending the breath of human knowledge. From the American station, McMurdo Base, there is a view of Captain Scotts hut which he sheltered in with his team for a period in the early 1900’s. There is a reference to a contractor working in Antarctica in 1998, known as ‘Nero’, on the blog Big Dead Place. He says ‘As I looked at the primitive hut with a stomach full of bacon burgers, a cold Guinness in hand, a Marlboro hanging from my mouth, and a towel clinging from my naked body as I had just stepped from the sauna, I tried to imagine Scott and his crew looking up at me. Their bellies bloated, their skin burnt by cold, and a pot of smoking seal blubber bubbling on the stove: their historic struggle mocked by my comfortable state’. While living conditions remain difficult and alien to us, they have changed immeasurably since December 1911, when Scott and Amundsen crawled very slowly across those vast plains of icy wilderness in search of the last great unknown: the South Pole.
Some sources and links:
British Antarctic Survey: www.antarctica.ac.uk/
Australian Antarctic Division: http://www.antarctica.gov.au/
Chef on ice: http://chefonice.com/
Big Dead Place: http://www.bigdeadplace.com/
Live South Pole webcam: http://www.usap.gov/videoclipsandmaps/spwebcam.cfm
Antarctica Online: http://www.antarcticaonline.com/culture/culture.htm
Men’s Journal Magazine: http://www.mensjournal.com/death-at-the-south-pole
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