Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter
24
Polar environments
Public and scientific interest in polar environments has never been greater. The twentieth
century witnessed expanding concern for the polar regions which built on earlier limited
contacts. First interest in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was commercial, with
the entry of whaling and fishing fleets from Europe and the United States. The nineteenth
century witnessed the dramatic attempts in the Canadian Arctic by Royal Navy
expeditions to find the North West Passage. Similarly in the Russian Arctic hectic
exploration brought increasing geographical knowledge. The pace of contacts and 'map
making' has quickened relentlessly in the twentieth century. Public interest was ignited
by the heroic exploits of Peary, Cook and Stefansson in the Arctic, and of Scott,
Amundsen and Shackleton in the Antarctic, together with the first whaling activities in
the southern ocean in the early 1890s. Interest between the First and Second World Wars
was based on questions of sovereignty over Arctic land, with the United States, Canada,
Denmark, Norway and Russia, in particular, wishing to stake their territorial claims.
Increased whaling, and political agreement over the Antarctic continent, typified a more
collaborative approach in the southern polar regions.
Since 1945 renewed interest has come from several new directions. The 'Cold War'
between the West and the former Soviet Union brought great defence interest in the
Arctic regions with the advent of intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) systems,
military early warning systems (e.g. the DEW line - Direct Early Warning) and the
reality of nuclear submarines operating beneath polar ice. Also, the period from the 1950s
to the 1970s saw a great expansion in the search for non-renewable mineral resources
(especially petroleum and non-ferrous minerals) by a commercial sector worried about
the future availability of such materials. During the 1980s and 1990s came three further
stimuli. First, there was concern about protecting and conserving 'wilderness' which
brought steps in setting up wildlife sanctuaries and national parks, on both a national and
an international scale. Second, there grew up increasing concern for the welfare of
aboriginal peoples in polar areas and a desire to give such peoples more 'rights' and a
greater voice in how their environment should be used. Third, there was growing concern
about global environmental changes - climate warming, ozone depletion, pollution of
ecosystems, biodiversity; such concern is rightly the province of the general public, as
well as of the international science community. It is very clear that polar landscapes play
a vital role in all these world-wide systems; polar landscapes act as an early-warning
device, a kind of environmental quality barometer, and also play a pivotal role in
regulating the direction of these global problems. It can confidently be predicted that
interest in polar landscapes is set to soar to new levels in the twenty-first century.
