All about Antarctica Dr. Steve Emslie

The Heroic Age in Antarctica dates from 1899-1922 when the first men to winter over and conduct scientific research and exploration endured many hardships with some deaths.  Besides providing the first scientific studies, photography and even poetry emerged from this period. It also can be defined by the isolation of the men involved, with no outside contact or chance of rescue if things went wrong.  Here, I review some of these early expeditions including the first winter over in sea ice with the ship Beligica from Belgium, the first winter over on the continent by Carsten Borchgrevink, and the first attempt at reaching the South Pole by Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton. 

Throughout this podcast, we have traced the history of Antarctica from its geologic origins, its earliest discovery and the first people to set foot there, to the first research stations and into the modern world. Even though Antarctica has been impacted throughout the past 120 years from research stations, tourism, and external anthropogenic factors such as climate change and pollution, it still remains the most remote and pristine place on earth, an extreme environment so relatively few people visit it. In this final episode, I go over the greatest threats facing Antarctica today, including global warming and sea level rise, and the importance in maintaining the Antarctic Treaty and Antarctica as a world park. It is up to all of us to ensure that Antarctica remains for peaceful purposes only. 

Fisheries for fin fish and krill began to increase in Antarctica in the late 1960s and 1970s and by 1982 the krill catch rose to a peak of over 520,000 tons removed. This increased harvest caused concern among scientists in Antarctic Treaty nations that fish and krill stocks would be depleted beyond recovery unless steps were taken to manage these fisheries. Here I discuss measures taken to avoid the loss of critical and keystone marine species in Antarctica with the addition of the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Living Marine Resources, or CCAMLR, to the Antarctic Treaty in 1980. This agreement caused treaty nations to conserve an entire marine ecosystem and monitor indicator species that represent the health of that ecosystem.  Today, CCAMLR sets quotas for fishery species including krill that help sustain their populations, though many obstacles remain. 

Although Antarctica is still the most remote and pristine place on earth, there have been many human-caused impacts to this continent and the marine environment around it. These impacts include pollution from research stations, tourism, and introduced species.  In this podcast, I discuss these impacts and how they led to the Environmental Protocol in the Antarctic Treaty in 1991. In addition, I give the history of tourism and when the first women are known to have visited the frozen continent.  Tourism (ship and air), which has been increasing exponentially since the 1970s, is now controlled by the tourist agencies themselves when the International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators (IAATO) was formed in 1991 to promote safe and environmentally responsible travel to Antarctica. Introduced species still arrive in Antarctica either naturally or from researchers and tourists, but most of these exotic species fail to survive there. I discuss a few of these species that have managed to gain a foothold in Antarctica today, facilitated in part of global warming trends that provide a more suitable habitat for them. 

Research stations in Antarctica must overcome three obstacles: logistics for how to build and maintain them, climate control for comfortable temperatures, and comfort in general for the personnel including space to spread out, quality of food, health and safety, and some leisure time.  In this podcast I describe how the first stone and wood huts in the Antarctic used for science and exploration only partially solved these problems and how modern research stations and their designs evolved and developed to the stations we have today. I also discuss some of the constraints and mental fatigue that personnel face when living in cold and darkness in the Antarctic winter. 

After the International Geophysical Year of 1957-1958, Antarctica became a focus of scientific research that continues to this day. In 1958, most of Antarctica was under territorial claims by seven nations, with overlapping claims between Britain, Chile, and Argentina leading to conflicts.  The U.S. President at the time, Dwight D. Eisenhower, called for claimant nations to hold a series of meetings and work out an agreement so that Antarctica could remain for 'peaceful purposes only'. These meetings led to the Antarctic Treaty of 1959, one of the most successful international treaties every signed. In this podcast I describe events leading up to this treaty and how it helped resolve international disputes. I also describe my own research on why Eisenhower never made a territorial claim for the U.S. in Antarctica, despite pressure at home to do so.