AMERICAN CLAIMS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26353, 7 January 1947, Page 5

AMERICAN CLAIMS

SHARE OF ANTARCTICA HUGE AREA INVOLVED NEARLY TWO MILLION SQUARE MILES WASHINGTON, Jan. 5. The plans of the United States to claim a big share of Antarctica, and the strategy for clinching them, will be discussed when Admiral Byrd returns from his present expedition, declared officials concerned with Antarctica policy. The officials said the discussions, which will be held next spring, will embrace the timing of the first formal United States claim to Antarctic territory. The proposals are to submit rival international claims to the United Nations, as well as the nature of future American survey and occupation efforts. . . The United States claim, it is expected, will be based largely on those which Lincoln Ellsworth and Admiral Byrd advanced in the north-west sector of Antarctica. Byrd and Ellsworth, after their survey of 1939 and 1941, declared that the United States could justify a claim to at least 1,000,000 square miles, and perhaps 800,000 square miles more extending to the south pole. The United States present policy is

to rest on the claims made by individual American explorers, and to recognise none of the claims made by other countries. A Buenos Aires message says that a specially adapted transport has left for the Antarctic, commanded by Captain Luis Garcia, who is a veteran of the Argentine Navy’s expeditions to the frigid zones below Tierra Del Fuego. The reported reason for the departure of the expedition is to give validity to Argentina’s claims to areas, including Graham Land. The claims date back 43 years and have been kept alive by the maintenance of a weather outpost on the frozen subcontinent. Two Chilean observers are accompanying the expedition.