Con sus -50° C de temperatura media invernal que el 21 de julio de 1983 en la estación rusa de Vostok, la Antártida alcanzó el valor récord de menos 89,6°C, una densidad poblacional que durante la larga noche austral es igual a 13.000 km² por habitante y que se convierte en “apenas” 1700 km² en el período estival, sus montañas que alcanzan los 5400 metros de altura, la Antártida es un laboratorio único en su género donde se estudia el estado de salud del planeta, se reconstruye su pasado y se formulan nuevas hipótesis para su futuro.
El término Antártida fue acuñado por los antiguos griegos en el siglo VI antes de Cristo: Antarktikos era el hemisferio opuesto a aquel que contenía la constelación de la estrella Polar, la Osa Menor o Arktikos. Mientras que a los filósofos, desde Pitágoras hasta Aristóteles, se les atribuye el mérito de haber imaginado la Tierra esférica.
En el siglo II después de Cristo, el astrónomo y geógrafo Claudio Ptolomeo, retomando las hipótesis griegas pensó que para contrarrestar el peso de las tierras presentes en el hemisferio norte debía necesariamente haber un continente también en el hemisferio sur. Pero aún por mucho tiempo se contaría como leyenda la existencia o no de una tierra en el Polo Sur. La primera representación de las costas de la Antártida data de 1513, cuando el almirante turco Piri Reis publica su carta del Atlántico en la que, al sur de la Tierra del Fuego, aparece una costa desconocida que reproduce de manera increíble el perfil de la Antártida como posiblemente era antes de su glaciación. En 1569 el flamenco Gerhard Kremer, más conocido como Gerardus Mercator, el padre de las proyecciones cartográficas aún utilizadas hoy para la navegación plana, dibujó en la parte sur de su globo terráqueo un vasto continente, de perfiles imaginarios y que cubría en su totalidad la capa polar: la Terra Australis Incognita. El primer navegante en desafiar los cuarenta rugientes y los cincuenta aullantes fue James Cook, quien cruzó el círculo polar antártico en 1773.
Pero el primer avistamiento verdadero fue el del 27 de enero de 1820, cuando una expedición comandada por el estonio Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen a bordo del Vostok navegó a unas veinte millas de distancia de la costa antártica. Mientras que el capitán americano, John Davis, fue el primero en desembarcar en el continente el 7 de febrero de 1821. Después de esa fecha habrá muchas otras expediciones, algunas terminadas trágicamente, otras de manera triunfante. Todas sin embargo contribuyeron a la conquista del último lugar desconocido del planeta.
The South Pole
But the South Pole is not only the historical memory of our geological evolution, it is also a reliable thermometer that constantly records the level of pollution on the planet. From this privileged observation point, in fact, thanks to a dense network of both manual and automated detectors, the size of the ozone hole and the extent of the greenhouse effect are accurately monitored. But not only that. From here scientists conduct important cosmological research, such as the study of ionized hydrogen particles coming from the sun that interact with the “earth’s magnet” causing the so-called magnetic storms. They then perform astronomical observations in the millimeter and infrared bands to capture the cosmic background radiation, which is the residue of the energy released during the Big Bang, hoping to shed light on how galaxies are born and what happened during the first moments of the Universe’s life.
The Antarctic Treaty
Legally, the Ice Continent is regulated by an international pact of neutrality, the Antarctic Treaty, which suspends any territorial claims south of the 60th parallel, prohibits all kinds of warlike and nuclear experiments, promotes the development of international scientific cooperation, and ensures the conservation and protection of flora and fauna throughout the territory. The treaty was signed in Washington on December 1, 1959, by twelve of the forty countries participating in the International Geophysical Year of 1957-1958 and came into force in 1961.
With that document, a legal system was given to the South Pole that “internationalized” the Continent, thus “freezing” the problem of those States that for strategic interests claimed its sovereignty. However, the agreement lacked any reference to the possible economic exploitation of energy and natural resources, and its duration was set at thirty years, at the expiration of which all the agreements made could be reconsidered by any contracting State and therefore renegotiated. Such a “flexible” approach was perhaps dictated by the fact that even at the time there were persistent rumors about possible hydrocarbon deposits identified between the Weddell Sea and the Ross Sea.
These were well-founded rumors, as in 1973 New Zealand, Japan, and the United States, thanks to a drilling project started in the Ross Area, found beneath a crust of ice hundreds of meters thick oil reserves estimated at 40 billion barrels. The news opened new and disturbing political and economic scenarios precisely when the great energy crisis of the late 1970s was looming on the horizon. Thus, there was a real race to Antarctica by those states that at the time of signing had been excluded from the Treaty.
It was necessary at all costs to be part of the elite group to subsequently have the right to exploit that immense territory that hid who knows what mineral and oil resources, or to freely fish in its icy waters tons and tons of krill, a small and nutritious shrimp, as essential to the food chain of Antarctic fauna as it was interesting for the livestock and food industry.
Not to mention that the Antarctic polar ice cap holds 91% of the planet’s ice, or 68% of the fresh water reserves. This data takes on enormous economic importance when considering that population growth recorded between 1900 and 1995 has sextupled the fresh water consumption of the planet and plunged at least one-third of the world’s population into water emergency.
Antarctic Treaty System
To curb the economic and territorial ambitions of many countries, the Antarctic Treaty System was born, and alongside the Pact signed in Washington were added the CCAS, the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Seals in 1978, and in 1980 the CCAMLR, a convention for the protection and conservation of Living Resources of the Antarctic Seas. A few years later, however, another Convention was enacted in Wellington that authorized and regulated the exploitation of Antarctica’s mineral resources.
The Madrid Protocol
Then the Madrid Protocol, signed in 1991 and entered into force on January 14, 1998, finally banned all types of mining exploitation for the next 50 years and requires operating nations to assess the environmental impact of any activity. The document thus puts an end to all economic ambitions and defines Antarctica as a “natural reserve devoted to peace and science”. The Antarctic Treaty has so far been signed by 45 nations representing more than 80% of the world’s population.
The reasons that led to the establishment of the Geophysical Year of 1957 were the same as those that led to the organization of the first and the second International Polar Year, in 1883 and 1932-33 respectively: to discover Antarctica, its resources, and its secrets. The next International Polar Year will be held in 2007.
The event was promoted by the greatest scientists in the world to rationalize human and economic resources and to carry out a vast study project on Earth’s magnetism and the upper atmosphere. On that occasion, SCAR was established, the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, with the specific purpose of coordinating research in Antarctica. The project marked the beginning of the exploration of the sixth Continent and, with the launch of the first artificial satellite, also the space age.
About ten thousand men from twelve different nations took part in that massive expedition, the largest in the history of explorations, installing forty scientific stations distributed across the entire polar ice cap.
Before that initiative, there were only about ten permanent bases mainly managed by Americans and Soviets in Antarctica. With the programs organized by AGI, a broader research activity based on international cooperation and sharing of collected data began. Today, Antarctica counts 68 international and interdisciplinary scientific bases.
EPICA, the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica
Since then, over forty years of studies have collected a huge amount of data and the latest important results obtained are those related to the EPICA project, the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica. Epica is a deep ice drilling program involving ten nations, carried out at the Dome C site near the Concordia station, at 3230 meters altitude and more than 1000 kilometers from the coast. The coring activity started in 1996 and was completed on December 21, 2004, extracting from a depth of 3270.2 meters an ice core dating back about 900,000 years. Thanks to all the cores drilled during the experiment, scientists now have detailed and continuous climate information covering a period of about 10-12 alternating glacial-interglacial cycles each lasting about one hundred thousand years. This very long climatic snapshot of the planet was formed with the layering of snow fallen in Antarctica over millennia.
The frozen snow has trapped and archived atmospheric information contained in gas particles present in the air at the time of its deposition. From the study of the samples it is possible to reconstruct the composition of the atmosphere in various eras, the evolution of the temperature on the Earth’s surface, and the climatic changes that have occurred from then until today, also understanding how much pollution caused by humans has impacted the climate.
The ice core, more than three kilometers long, has not yet been fully examined, but the first data have already given important news: first of all, from the analysis of the shallower layers, i.e., those recording events of the last century, a reduction of lead and chlorofluorocarbons, the infamous CFC responsible for the thinning of the ozone layer, was found, while polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons contained in unleaded gasoline or produced by waste combustion and heating plants have increased.
Also, the concentration of carbon dioxide, responsible for the greenhouse effect, in the last 440 thousand years has never been as high as today.
Other data emerging from reading the core drilled at Dome-C relate to the temperature and duration of warm and cold periods caused mainly by astronomical phenomena, such as imperceptible changes in the Earth’s orbit around the Sun and the tilt of its axis of rotation, which lead to variations in the amount of solar energy reaching high latitudes. From the study of the samples examined, it has been seen that temperatures similar to the current ones have already occurred in the past 400 thousand years but not before, that warm periods such as ours occupy only 5-10% of the examined time span, and that the current warm interglacial period, which began 11,500 years ago, should last at least another 13 thousand years, provided humans do not interfere. Therefore, the nightmare of a new ice age imagined in the film “The Day After Tomorrow” seems, for now, averted. However, even though nothing catastrophic is forecast on the horizon, scholars suggest monitoring human action on climate and environment and evaluating changes in the overall climatic picture without alarmism but certainly with scientific realism.
The Swiss Polar Research Commission, CSP
The Swiss Polar Research Commission, CSP, also participated in the Epica project. During the 28th SCAR meeting held in Bremerhaven from October 3 to 9, 2004, the CSP received international recognition for the work carried out in Antarctica, and thanks to the significant results achieved at Dome C by scientists from Swiss universities, the Swiss Confederation became a full member of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research.
Up to 140 million years ago, Antarctica was part of the supercontinent Gondwana, which included Africa, Arabia, India, Australia, New Zealand, and South America. At the end of the Jurassic, the breakup of the supercontinent began, and about 20 million years ago Antarctica completely separated from the other lands to slowly occupy the polar ice cap. A drift lasting millions of years, theorized in the 1920s by Alfred Wegener, the German scientist who reconstructed the shape of Pangea, and only in 1950, with the development of geological mappings of the seabeds, was supported by scientific evidence.
