Wealth in ANTARCTICA

Cue (NZERS), Issue 35, 15 November 1945, Page 25

Wealth in ANTARCTICA

NEW ZEALAND is at present studying the future of her industries. Some are long overdue for expansion; others that are war-time growths will be developed from their present infancy to maturity if proposals by the Industrial Development Committee are adopted. Not the least important of these is whaling, and it is proposed that a generous proportion of the large capital expenditure mooted by the committee should be allocated for this important industry. The Ross Dependency, 175,000 square miles of ice-covered mainland whose territorial waters abound with large numbers of whales, is a dependency under the jurisdiction of the GovernorGeneral of New Zealand, but, although numerous factory whaling ships have operated there, New Zealand has had no capital invested in these enterprises to date and has taken little commercial interest in the dependency.

Whaling should only be the start, however, for although no economic wealth has been won there, that it is there for the taking cannot be doubted. Below the ice coal and minerals await the miner’s pick, shovel, and pneumatic drills and excavators. Alaska, purchased for about 81,500,000 by the United States Government, has repaid its capital cost many times oyer; Russia has exploited her icy hinterlands to enormous profit.

Will New Zealand follow the lead of these and other countries and seek her missing 'minerals and oil and supplement her existing fields of coal and precious ores in the Ross dependencyor will she continue to

sit hack while the explorers, whalers, and miners cf other nations —more enterprising—find and later reap the rich harvest that is there?

'Many nations are awake to the potentialities of Antarctica. In this vast inimical region of gigantic icebergs, towering mountains, glacial plains and fuming volcanoes, even during the war explorers of four nations have been staking their countries’ claims to great new tracts of land. Representatives of Great Britain, the U.5.A.,, Norway, and Argentina are still charting an Antarctic area which may one day prove as important, as the modern industrial region that Soviet Russia has created in the former wastelands of the Arctic Circle.

A second British expedition has been sent out under Colonial Office auspices with the avowed intention of studying the possible exploitation of Antarctic mineral wealth —some forty specialised research workers, including geologists, meteorologists, naturalists, mining and fishing experts, are manning a chain of fully equipped and self-contained experimental bases between South Georgia (a dependency of the Falkland Islands) and the Weddell Sea.

Simultaneously, the United States Congress has voted a large -sum for an aerial survey of a fresh sector of Queen Maud’s Land, and Norwegian experts are on hand to study the early resumption and development of whaling. The opening up of Antarctica, in fact, is passing from the realms of the merely academic into the sphere of the practical. The -British expeditions have been joined by radio location scientists, who expect to 1 solve a number of radio beam problems vital to the improvement of radio transmissions between the Antipodes and the Motherland. The weather men, too, are already stringing out a pattern of radio stations to help provide more accurate weather forecasts for the whole of the southern hemisphere.

These stations will be of inestimable value to Australia and New Zealand. Some of them are completely automatic and, report their observations without human assistance, and observers several hundred miles away can deduce the character of the weather, temperature, wind velocity, and solar radiations adjacent to the station from the pattern of dots and dashes. In addition, an astonishing amount of automatic photographic data has been collected on bird movements and the habits of whales, seals

and fish; and the land survey parties expect to spend the next two years making a precise and accurate prospect of Graham Land.

What of the wealth that is there? Though as yet exploited it is by no means unknown. There is certainly a vast reservoir of coal in Antarctica, as well as iron, gold, molybdenum, copper and amber. Sir Edge worth Davis has spoken of a coalfield in the Ross sector which was estimated at a thousand miles long, and Scott’s party discovered coal seams and outcrops in the side of Mount Buckley as long ago as 1912. There may be oil and radium too, besides whaling; and there are illimitable fishing potentialities, not to mention penguins. In the weather, in turn, there are clues to conditions throughout half the world, evidence that may mean fertility for the Australian deserts and an end to the recurrent droughts that afflict South Africa. ’ The Antarctic stations, measuring cloud formations and sounding the upper air. defining ice movements and examining the temperature and contents of the water have tracked the South Polar anti-cyclone and proved its misdemeanours. An extreme winter in Antarctica foretells heavy rains in Argentina, Chile, South Africa and the Southern Coasts of Australia, and the familiar downpours of New Zealand. A hot Antarctic summerand the sun within ten degrees of the Pole can give sunstroke —deluges the ocean with melting ice and the coolness reduces rainfall in the interior of South Africa. Ultimately the meteorological events of Antarctica may be used to predict the intensity of the Indian monsoon and the height of the Nile flood.

Superficially, perhaps, Antarctica is still a patchwork empire of fact and mystery, but gradually the successive exploration parties have built up a store of knowledge that extends to the depth of the ice, the migration of whales, the movement of penguins, the drift of submarine organisms, and the speed of the wind. At one time

the whole of the Antarctic area was thought, like the Arctic, to be mainly water. It is now known that the Antarctic Circle is nearly filled with a huge continental land mass.

Graham Land, however, has been shown not to belong to the main body of land, but to be an island, the equivalent of Greenland, and Antarctica itself may yet turn out to be not a single continent but two great islands. So far as exploration ha.probed it is a region barred by the tremendous clockwise currents of the Ross Sea, defended by the fiercest winds in the world, desolate, ghastly, devoid of terrestrial life. Everything that nature has built there is on the monstrous scale of nightmare. Huge islands have been carefully reported and never seen by ship again. Icebergs have been circled and found to measure eighty miles long. The South Pole plateau itself towers as high as the Alps.

. Earthquakes, too, have been inferred from peculiarities in the drift ice ; and the wind, sometimes raising its average 50 miles per hour to screaming blizzards at 320 miles per hour, can produce devastating force. Yet there is a hope that perhaps one idiay this sa/vage hinterland will be tamed to the service of mankind as the North-West Territories are being tamed; and hence the hint of coal and oil has brought to Antarctica the geographic equivalent of a gold-rush.

The last remaining piece of unclaimed territory was annexed by Norway as recently as January, 1939, when she declared the area between 20 degrees West and 45 degrees East to be her sovereignty. In the same month the American explorer, Lincoln Ellsworth, landed a seaplane on a snowy plateau in Eastern Antarctica and hoisted the Stars and Stripes on what he imagined to be the ’’last unclaimed patch,” but this_ .region had actually been discovered and claimed

for Great Britain by Sir Douglas Mawson eight years before. The British Discovery 11. made a similar mistake in ’’locating” as unmapped land territory which the Norwegians had already defined and of which the Germans once gravely claimed 140, oqo square miles.

Until recently a white blank, the maps of Antarctica to-day divide the six million square miles of territory between six or seven countries, but the border lines run as straight as the Curzon Line and are no less disputed- Serious variance still exists, for instance, between the maps issued by the Royal Geographic Society and the National Geographic Society of America. The Falkland Islands’ dependencies have been the subject of controversy for a century, and both Spain and Norway unsuccessfully objected when Britain formally maintained their annexation in 1908.

In 1928, in a Note to the. United States, Great Britain laid claim to sovereignty over 4,000.000 square

miles ”by virtue of discovery,” but this became merely the basis for sustained arbitration. In 1933 over 3,000,600 square miles were formally proclaimed Australian Antarctic Territory —adjacent to the area administered by New Zealand. But all British possessions in the Antarctic are disputed by the Argentine Government !

Amid all this comedy of errors, Chile and Peru wait in the background, casting eager eyes on the whaling zone and dubiously weighing the possibilities of closure. It is > noteworthy that Chile has claimed all land discovered or undiscovered, all ’’islands, reefs, glaciers, and pack ice” between the 53rd and 90th meridians. Norway similarly once decided to annex all land between the eastern limit cf Queen Maud’s Land and the western limit of Crown Princess Martha’s Land, when a Byrd expedition had carried out an exhaustive survey of Queen Malud’s Land and claimed territory there on behalf of America.

Congress in turn voted L 68,000 towards Admiral Byrd’s last expedition, with its (object of establishing three colonies to be permanently occupied. On the other hand, ’’Little America,” the base of Admiral Byrd’s two former expeditions, was situated within the British Ross Sea Dependency, and until the more pressing events of war put 'Polar exploration in the background, it was feared that Great Britain might lose her Western Ross Sea dependency, not without

effect on the British whaling Industry and the taxesestimated at L 500,000 annually—levied on foreign whaling vessels. 'Such names as Franklin, Scott, Shackleton, and Mawson shine in Britain’s title deeds. Since the voyage icif the Southern Cross in 1898 more than a score of British expeditions have assisted in comprehensive Antarctic exploration, apart from whaling research. Often the margin of claim has been narrow, and one remembers how Scott and his companions perished after reaching the South Pole and finding the flag of Amundsen there, planted a month before. America had ignored Antarctica for nearly a century, but Admiral Byrd undertook the first aeroplane flight over the Antarctic in 1926, and many subsequent flights have produced wonderful photographs and much extra knowledge.

It will be interesting to watch the future of Antarctica. Admiral Byrd has reported to a U.S. commission that a single group of mineral deposits on the edge of the American Polar territory could provide enough liquid and solid fuel to last a century. Sir Doluglas Mawsori has spoken of fur-farming, presumably with imported animals, fishing, and electricity generated by the winds. The Russians have harnessed the Siberian gales with windmills and found a ready means of providing power and heat for industry. From the north, then, there sounds a clarion for the south. Will New Zealand, among other nations, answer the call?