Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Russian marine biologist, Maria Klenova, worked in the summer station of Mirny, and, a
decade later, the US finally allowed women to participate in their national programme.
Women finally reached the South Pole in 1969, some fifty-odd years after men, and in the
year when other men were landing on the Moon. In the 1970s, another first was achieved,
this time involving the first women scientists to winter over, as part of the American
Antarctic programme. It was not until the early 1990s, by way of contrast, that the British
Antarctic Survey allowed women to over-winter at their stations.
The role of women in the history of Antarctic discovery remains ambivalent. On the one
hand, men have dominated the Antarctic's occupation and settlement as well as exploration.
Women have frequently had to battle against gendered assumptions about their suitability.
On the other hand, women have been used symbolically and physically to explore, colonize,
and settle the Antarctic. Women and their Antarctic children have been used for geopolitical
purposes to cement national claims to territory. Both men and women, in their different
ways, performed gendered service to states and sponsors. Notwithstanding the presence of
women as scientists and tourists, the fact remains that men fundamentally shape the history
of Antarctic exploration and engagement, those men mainly white and hailing from the
Euro-American world. So there is also a racial dimension to this history of exploration. This
is changing. Non-white men and a diversity of women from the global South are beginning
to make their presence felt, mimicking, challenging, and extending previous acts of
exploration and discovery.
Contemporary discoveries
While explorers discovered Antarctica in the sense of bringing it into systems of knowledge
- such as maps (geological as well as cartographical) - it is worth also thinking of tourism
as a form of discovery, this time personal rather than universal. Not mentioned in the text of
the Antarctic Treaty, the omission was not surprising given that the first commercial visit
occurred only in 1956 via an over-flight, and in 1957 when a Pan-American Airways
aircraft landed at McMurdo Sound. Forq">C6to the Antarctic Treaty delegations, les
événements du jour were science, security, and sovereignty. Within a decade of the Treaty's
signing, however, ship-based cruises had become routine, usually involving yachts, even if
overall numbers remained modest. Between the 1950s and 1970s, fewer than 1,000 tourists
a year visited the Antarctic. Numbers began to increase in the 1980s and 1990s, with figures
exceeding 5,000, and then most notably in the last decade, the figures exceeded 20,000 and
peaked at 35,000-40,000 at the height of the tourist boom in the 1990s and 2000s.
Following the onset of the financial crisis (c. 2008), the numbers declined somewhat to
around 37,000 in 2009-10, with the vast majority voyaging by ship around the Antarctic
