Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
CCAMLR who struggle to reconcile the fact that some of the worst offenders are actually
members of the very body intended to promote sustainable living resource extraction.
Mineral resources
Mineral resources were first discovered in the first decade of the last century. Frank Wild, a
member of the Shackleton expedition of 1907-9, spotted a coal seam on the Beardmore
Glacier. No one at the time considered them remotely exploitable, but the seams (and the
fossils within them) did help to confirm the Antarctic's earlier geological history and its
physical relationship to southern Africa, India, Australia, and South America. Since that
expedition, generations of geologists, geophysicists, marine biologists, and oceanographers
played their part in exploring and recording traces of minerals both on the polar continent
and offshore. As visitors to the Antarctic Peninsula would swiftly discover, evidence for
mineralization is not hard to find. Green-stained cliffs and mountains hint at the presence of
copper alongside other traces of iron, nickel, cobalt, lead, gold, and silver. Overall, mineral
resource prospects in the Antarctic Peninsula are judged to be modest, and coal seams in the
Trans-Antarctic Mountains vary in quality and quantity ranging from bituminous to
anthracitic. Elsewhere, occurrences of iron, lead, uranium, and zinc have been recorded in
East Antarctica in Dronning Maud, Enderby Land, and alongside the coal-bearing strata of
the Prince Charles Mountains. Again, the general view suggests that these areas might be
worthy of and scientific understandingk
Speculation about future resource wealth has
instead focused offshore. A 1974 US Geological Survey Report suggested that oil and gas
might, one day, be found in commercial quantities, leading to a slew of headlines about
Antarctica's potential to be the polar equivalent of the Middle East in hydrocarbon terms.
Coinciding as it did with the OPEC 'oil shock', this was hyperbole. At the current time,
there has been no commercial drilling, and earlier projects such as the Deep Sea Drilling
Project (DSDP) and Ocean Drilling Program were scientific ventures not mainly concerned
with prospecting for oil and gas deposits. The DSDP, for example, did encounter traces of
natural gas in the Ross Sea in the early 1970s, but its remit was to study and gather
materials from the ocean floor around the world. Hydrocarbon exploitation would
encounter a continental shelf with average depths of 500 metres, and there are neo-tectonic
hazards to boot such as faulting and volcanism. Onshore sedimentary basins that might
prove geologically of interest are under thick ice, and thus unlikely to attract any
commercial interest, even if mineral exploitation were ever permitted.
The Protocol on Environmental Protection currently bans all forms of mining and mineral
exploitation. An earlier attempt to negotiate an agreement specifically regarding mineral
resources (the Convention on the Regulation of Antarctic Mineral Resources, CRAMRA)
floundered in the 1980s because two claimant states, Australia and France, walked away
