Throw to the extreme south

More and more people want to find their place on the Antarctic ice

Belarus has decided to join the Antarctic powers. Last month, Minsk officially joined the Antarctic Treaty, which gives the right to work on this continent, and in early July the National Academy of Sciences announced that a Belarusian research station would open on the coast of the Cosmonaut Sea in November of this year. This message may cause some irony: there are thousands of kilometers from Minsk to the South Pole, Belarus does not have a scientific fleet capable of delivering scientific equipment to Antarctica, and our western neighbors did not inherit a serious school of polar research from the USSR. One could even call this a PR move by the government of Alexander Lukashenko. However, surprisingly, Minsk is by no means alone in its desire to go to the “far south”. The list of Antarctic powers now includes the most unexpected countries - from Bulgaria and the Czech Republic to China and Brazil.

Belarus will not have to start its Antarctic epic from scratch: Russia will divide and make room, fortunately there is a lot of space on the continent. Minsk will be given the use of one of our small stations in the Vechernyaya Mountain area. The practice of transferring homes to another country is not new: for example, in 1958, the USSR donated the mothballed Oasis station to Poland. And this time, Belarusians will not pay anything to Moscow for a place of scientific work, but as a kind of barter, neighbors will join the research of the Russian Molodezhnaya station. This, as Interfax noted, will avoid the cessation of these scientific works due to lack of funding. In addition, domestic polar explorers will take on the delivery of Belarusian colleagues to the shores of Antarctica, which will save Minsk a significant amount - about 10 million dollars. Creating an Antarctic station from scratch would cost it the same amount.

The sixth continent is coming into fashion. India, the "most equatorial" of the world's big powers, is also increasing its Antarctic research. Now Delhi (more precisely, Goa - the Indians have located a national center for Antarctic and oceanological research in one of the most famous resorts in the country) is interested in the affairs of bygone eras: the continental plate of East Antarctica, like most of modern India south of the Himalayas, is more than a hundred million years ago they formed a single continent, Gondwana (which included present-day Australia, South America, and part of Africa). Then, when this supercontinent broke up, the fragments spread across the globe. Eventually, the Antarctic plate, once located near the equator, ended up at the South Pole and merged with smaller land fragments to form West Antarctica. The Indian plate, which was located in the Northern Hemisphere during the Gondwana era, shifted towards the equatorial zone. India intends to build a research station to study the once neighboring continent on the Larsemann Hills in East Antarctica.

Now there are several dozen permanent stations operating on the southern continent, most of which belong to states with long traditions of polar research. Among the leaders in Antarctic exploration are the USA, Great Britain, Russia, as well as neighboring countries such as Australia, Chile and Argentina. However, in the latter case we are talking not only about science, but also about the geopolitics of the Southern Hemisphere. After all, sooner or later Antarctica will have to be divided or somehow delimited spheres of influence. Apparently, this distant continent will someday lose the white color with which it is traditionally painted on the political map of the world, and will be covered with multi-colored spots, like all other parts of the world.

The famous Antarctic Treaty, which came into force in 1961, does not at all declare the continent “nobody’s,” as is often believed. This is a bit of an imprecise wording. Basically, in full accordance with the local climate, it somewhat “freezes” potential disputes between the powers that are parties to the treaty. In other words, Antarctica - the zone south of the 60th parallel - is declared a zone without military action, and the parties to the agreement stop trying to figure out who claims which piece of the glacier and whether the claimant has the right to such claims. Nevertheless, almost every part of the continent already has its own potential owner (and several countries are claiming their rights to some especially attractive places at once).

However, for several decades, people in Antarctica did mostly science. Not least due to the fact that almost any economic activity on eternal ice is quite expensive and quarreling with other countries over a still useless continent is not a very meaningful activity. So far, only two business models are thriving in Antarctica - fishing in the waters of the Southern Ocean and extreme tourism, when vacationers are shown local beauties - seals, penguins and icebergs. But the number of research stations (many of which are equally engaged in both scientific research and serving tourists) south of the 60th parallel is growing at such a pace that it is becoming more and more difficult to consider the icy continent uninhabited every year.

Mikhail MANSKOY