HISTORY30 - Antarctica

 

This article is about the history of Antarctica.  My previous articles on the history of various places in the world, and the history of maps, showed me that I knew virtually nothing about Antarctica.  It’s time to correct that.

Map of the southern hemisphere showing Antarctica in relation to the closest other continents.

  

My primary source for this article is Antarctica / History, Animals & Facts / Britannica, supplemented with numerous other online sources.

Natural Landscape

Antarctica is the world’s fifth largest and southernmost continent.  It is also the world’s highest, driest, windiest, coldest, and iciest continent. Antarctica is about 5.5 million square miles in size, and thick ice covers about 98 percent of the land.   The average elevation of Antarctica is about 7,200 feet, with the highest peak, Mount Vinson, in the Ellsworth Mountains, at 16,050 feet.  The continent is divided into East Antarctica (which is largely composed of a high ice-covered plateau) and West Antarctica (which is largely an ice sheet covering an archipelago of mountainous islands).

Lying almost concentrically around the South Pole, “Antarctica” means “opposite to the Arctic,” in geographic terms.  (As an adjective, “arctic” means bitter cold.)  The continent would be essentially circular except for the out-flaring Antarctic Peninsula, which reaches toward the southern tip of South America (some 600 miles away), and for two large bays, the Ross Sea and the Weddell Sea. These bays make the continent somewhat pear-shaped, dividing it into two unequal-sized parts.  East Antarctica lies mostly in the east longitudes and is larger (about the size of the continental United States) than West Antarctica, which lies wholly in the west longitudes. East and West Antarctica are separated by the approximately 2,100-mile-long Transantarctic Mountains.

The continent of Antarctica. Note the Antarctic Circle at 66 degrees, 34 minutes south latitude.

The continental ice sheet contains approximately six million cubic miles of ice, representing about 90 percent of the world’s ice and about 70 percent of its fresh water.  Its average thickness is over a mile, at about 7,085 feet, with a maximum thickness of almost three miles. Unique to Antarctica, ice shelves (large floating platforms of ice that form where a glacier or ice sheet flows down to a coastline and onto the ocean surface) cover the parts of the Ross and Weddell Seas close to land.  Around the Antarctic coast, these two large shelves - the Ross Ice Shelf and the Ronne Ice Shelf - together with other smaller shelves, glaciers and ice sheets, continually “calve,” or discharge, icebergs into the seas.

Antarctica is by far the coldest continent.  The average annual temperature ranges from -76 degrees Fahrenheit at the most elevated parts of the interior to 14 degrees along the coast. The lowest reliably measured temperature in Antarctica was −128.6 degrees Fahrenheit on July 12, 1983 on the East Antarctica ice sheet.  The highest temperature ever recorded was 69.3 degrees Fahrenheit on February 9, 1920 on the northern Antarctic Peninsula, which, because of its maritime influences, is the warmest part of the continent.

Fierce winds characterize most coastal regions, particularly of East Antarctica, where cold, dense air flows down the steep slopes off interior highlands. Gusts estimated at between 140 and 155 miles per hour have occurred.  Rain is almost unknown. The average precipitation is only about two inches per year over the polar plateau, though considerably more, perhaps 10 times as much, falls in the coastal belt.  Great cyclonic storms circle Antarctica in endless west-to-east procession. Moist maritime air from the north, interacting with cold polar air, makes the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica one of the world’s stormiest.

The cold desert climate of Antarctica supports only an impoverished community of cold-tolerant land plants that are capable of surviving lengthy winter periods of total or near-total darkness during which photosynthesis cannot take place.  Growth must occur in short summer bursts lasting only a few days, a few weeks, or a month or two.  Antarctica plants include lichens, mosses, liverworts, molds, yeasts and other fungi, as well as freshwater algae and bacteria.  Antarctic seas contain plankton plant life and algae.

Native land animals are wholly invertebrate and consist of microscopic organisms and arthropods, many species being parasitic on birds and seals.

About 45 species of birds live in the Antarctic region, but only three - the emperor penguin, Antarctic petrel, and South Polar skua - breed exclusively on the continent or on nearby islands.  An absence of mammalian land predators and the rich offshore food supply make Antarctic coasts a haven for immense seabird breeding places. 

Antarctica sea animals include seals, porpoises, dolphins, whales, and 100 species of fish.

Flora and fauna in Antarctica.

 Geologic Evolution

The continent of Antarctica was not always at the Earth’s South Pole and the journey to get there took hundreds of millions of years.

Continents rest on massive slabs of rock called tectonic plates. The plates are always moving and interacting in a process called plate tectonics.  Some of the most dynamic sites of tectonic activity are seafloor spreading zones and giant rift valleys.  In the process of seafloor spreading, molten rock rises from within the Earth and adds new seafloor (oceanic crust) to the edges of the old.  As the seafloor grows wider, the continents on opposite sides of the ridge move away from each other.  Rift valleys are sites where a continental landmass is ripping itself apart.  The processes of seafloor spreading, rift valley formation, and subduction (where heavier tectonic plates sink beneath lighter ones) are the main geologic forces behind what we think of as continental drift (which by the way, is still happening today at the rate of an inch or less per year).

Two hundred and fifty million years ago, Antarctica was part of an enormous supercontinent called Pangaea.  (See the figure below.)  Much of Antarctica was densely forested.  By 200 million years ago, Pangaea had separated into two super continents, with Antarctica a part of Gondwana.  Gondwana began breaking up, and over millions of years, separated into pieces that moved away from one another.  These pieces slowly assumed their shapes and positions as the continents we recognize today.

During these millions of years, when two or more continents were “touching, there was considerable plant and animal migration across continents.

Antarctica became isolated with the opening of the Drake Passage between the continent and South America sometime between 49 million and 17 million years ago.

As Antarctica “drifted” southward, about 45 million years ago, glacial icing of the continent began, caused by a dramatic decrease in Earth’s atmospheric temperature due to the onset of the current ice age.  By 23 million years ago, Antarctica was mostly icy forest, and for the last 15 million years, it has been a frozen desert under a thick ice sheet.

Now bathed by polar ice, remains of luxuriant extinct floras - as well as fossils of reptiles, dinosaurs, and amphibians - have been discovered in Antarctica.

Timeline of continental "drift" due to tectonic plate activity.

 

Discovery and Early Exploration

The discovery of Antarctica started with speculation in ancient Rome, later underwent 300 years of near misses by early European explorers, and finally occurred early in the 19^th century.

A hypothetical continent, Terra Australis (Latin for South Land) was postulated by Romans in the 5^th century to exist in the far south of the globe.  The existence of Terra Australis was not based on any survey or direct observation, but rather on the idea that continental land in the Northern Hemisphere should be balanced by land in the Southern Hemisphere.

European explorers first approached Antarctica in 1520, when Portuguese navigator and explorer Ferdinand Magellan rounded South America during his journey to circumnavigate the world.  In the 18th century, British naval officer James Cook and others explored the near Antarctic region; Cook circumnavigated the globe in high southern latitudes between 1772 and 1775, proving that Terra Australis, if it existed at all, lay somewhere beyond the ice packs that he discovered between about 60 degrees and 70 degrees south latitude.  It is believed that Cook came within 150 miles of mainland Antarctica.

The first person to see the continent is uncertain.  Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen, a Baltic German officer in the Imperial Russian Navy; Edward Bransfield, an officer in the Royal Navy; and Nathaniel Palmer, an American sealing captain, all may have sighted Antarctica in 1820.  Bellingshausen sighted a land-like mass of ice, possibly the shelf edge of continental ice, on January 27^th; Bransfield caught sight of land on January 30^th that the British later considered to be a mainland part of the Antarctic Peninsula; and on November 18^th Palmer unequivocally saw the Antarctic Peninsula.

Fabian von Bellingshausen, a German officer in the Russian Navy, may have been the first European to site Antarctica.

The first landing on the Antarctic mainland is thought to have been made by American Captain John Davis, a sealer, who claimed to have set foot there on 7 February 1821, though this is not accepted by all historians.

Europeans continued exploring the Antarctic region for two main reasons: commercial gain and charting cartographic and magnetic contours.  While sealers charted some islands and sea routes, they kept this information secret so as to not reveal their hunting locations.  One of the first, James Weddell, a British sealer, sailed into what is now known as the Weddell Sea in 1823. Early sealers principally hailed from Britain and the United States, but, by the mid-19th century, South Africans, Australians, New Zealanders, and Frenchmen had joined them.

The charting of the Earth’s magnetic field, with its simplifications for navigation, was another major incentive for these expeditions. Together with nationalism, geomagnetic surveying was the main motivation behind, for example, the 1839-43 British expedition led by British explorer James Clark Ross, which discovered the Ross Sea, the Ross Ice Shelf, and the Victoria Land coast.  Jules-Sébastien-César Dumont d’Urville’s French expedition of 1837-40 discovered Adélie Land and later claimed it for France.  Charles Wilkes’s U.S. naval expedition of 1838-42 explored a large section of the East Antarctica coast.  

The first documented landing on the mainland of East Antarctica was at Victoria Land by the American sealer Mercator Cooper on 26 January 1853.

These explorers, despite their impressive contributions to South Polar exploration, did not penetrate the interior of the continent and, rather, formed a broken line of discovered lands along the coastline of Antarctica.

“Heroic Age” of Exploration

The Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration began at the end of the 19^th century and closed with famed explorer Ernest Shackleton's death in 1922 on a coastal mapping expedition.  During this period, the Antarctic continent became the focus of an international effort that resulted in intensive scientific and geographical exploration in which 17 major Antarctic expeditions were launched by ten countries.

Great advances were made in not only geographic but also scientific knowledge of the continent. They proved the feasibility of Antarctic overwintering and introduced new technologies.  Here are a few examples:

The Belgian ship, Belgian, under the command of Adrien de Gerlache, became the first vessel to winter in Antarctic waters when, from March 1898 to March 1899, it was trapped and drifted in pack ice of the Bellingshausen Sea.  A scientific party under Norwegian explorer Carsten E. Borchgrevink spent the next winter camped at Cape Adare, north of the Ross Ice Shelf, in the first planned overwintering on the continent.

The British National Antarctic Expedition (1901-04), led by British naval officer and explorer Robert Falcon Scott on board the Discovery, set a new record for reaching the farthest point south when Scott, together with Anglo-Irish explorer Ernest H. Shackleton and English explorer Edward A. Wilson, reached 82 degrees 17 minutes south latitude on the Ross Ice Shelf on December 30, 1902. Scott also went aloft in a tethered balloon for aerial reconnaissance, and Shackleton first used motorized transport on Ross Island, during the Nimrod expedition (1907-09).  

Reaching the Earth’s southern geographic pole provided extra strong motivation for polar exploration in the early 1900s.  Two expeditions set off in 1910 in a race to reach the South Pole: a party led by Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen, and Robert Falcon Scott's British group.  Amundsen succeeded in reaching the Pole on December 14, 1911.  One month later, on January 17, 1912, Scott’s Terra Nova Expedition also reached the South Pole.  Whereas Amundsen’s party of skiers and dog teams, arrived back at their coastal starting point with little difficulty, Scott’s polar party of five people traveled on foot and perished on the Ross Ice Shelf.

Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen and his team at the South Pole on December 16, 1911.

The Australia-New Zealand Antarctic Expedition took place between 1911–1914 and was led by Sir Douglas Mawson.  It concentrated on the stretch of Antarctic coastline nearest Australia.

The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914–1917 was led by Ernest Shackleton and set out to cross the continent via the South Pole, starting by ship from Elephant Island, north of the Antarctic Peninsula.  However, their ship, the Endurance, was trapped and crushed by pack ice in the Weddell Sea before they were able to land. The expedition members survived after a heroic journey pulling sleds over pack ice, a prolonged drift on an ice-floe, and a voyage in three small boats to Elephant Island.

A related component of the Trans-Antarctic Expedition was the Ross Sea party, led by Aeneas Mackintosh. Its objective was to lay equipment depots across the Ronne Ice Shelf, in order to supply Shackleton's party crossing from the Weddell Sea.  All the required depots were laid, but in the process, three men, including the leader Mackintosh, lost their lives.

Shackleton's last expedition, and the one that brought the “Heroic Age” to a close, was the Shackleton-Rowett Expedition from 1921-22 on board the ship Quest.  Its vaguely defined objectives included coastal mapping, a possible continental circumnavigation, the investigation of sub-Antarctic islands, and oceanographic work.  After Shackleton's death of a heart attack on 5 January 1922, Quest completed a shortened program before returning home.

From World War I to IGY

The period between World Wars I and II marks the beginning of the mechanical, particularly the aerial, age of Antarctic exploration. Wartime developments in aircraft, aerial cameras, radios, and motor transport were adapted for polar operation.

After 1927, aircraft and mechanized transportation were increasingly used.  Hubert Wilkins first visited Antarctica in 1921-1922 as an ornithologist attached to the Shackleton-Rowett Expedition.  In 1927, Wilkins and pilot Carl Ben Eielson began exploring the Antarctic by aircraft.

U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd led five expeditions to Antarctica during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. He overflew the South Pole with pilot Bernt Balchen on 28 and 29 November 1929, to match his overflight of the North Pole in 1926.

Byrd’s fourth expedition, called “Operation Highjump,” in the summer of 1946-47, was the most massive sea and air operation theretofore attempted in Antarctica.  It involved 13 ships, including two seaplane tenders and an aircraft carrier, and a total of 25 airplanes.  Ship-based aircraft returned with 49,000 photographs that, together with those taken by land-based aircraft, covered about 60 percent of the Antarctic coast, nearly one-fourth of which had been previously unseen. Other technological developments - such as advances in cold-weather clothing, vehicles, and fuel for overland travel - further opened up the continent’s interior for scientific exploration.

Captain Finn Ronne, Byrd's executive officer, returned to Antarctica with his own expedition in 1947-1948, with Navy support, three planes, and dogs.  Ronne disproved the notion that the continent was divided in two and established that East and West Antarctica were one single continent, i.e. that the Weddell Sea and the Ross Sea are not connected.  The expedition explored and mapped large parts of Palmer Land and the Weddell Sea coastline, and identified the Ronne Ice Shelf.  Ronne covered 3,600 miles by ski and dog sled - more than any other explorer in history.

The 1955-58 Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition successfully completed the first overland crossing of Antarctica, via the South Pole.  It was headed by British explorer Dr. Vivian Fuchs, with New Zealander Sir Edmund Hillary leading the New Zealand Ross Sea Support team. Fuchs set out from Shackleton Base on the transcontinental journey in November 1957, with a twelve-man team travelling in six vehicles, along the way carrying out scientific research including seismic soundings and gravimetric readings.  Fuchs' team reached the Pole on January 19, 1958, then continued overland, following the route that Hillary had laid out, to Scott Base.  (Thirty-nine years later, on January 18, 1997, Børge Ousland, a Norwegian explorer, finished the first unassisted Antarctic solo crossing.)

Vivian Fuchs' route on the first successful crossing of Antarctica via the South Pole.

 

 

The first half of the 20th century was the colonial period in the history of Antarctica.  Between 1908 and 1942, seven nations (see below) decreed sovereignty over pie wedge-shaped sectors of the continent. Many nations - including the United States, the Soviet Union, Japan, Sweden, Belgium and Germany - carried out Antarctic explorations without lodging formal territorial claims.  The competition for national influence was especially acute in the Antarctic Peninsula.

By the 1940s and 1950s, seven nations claimed sovereignty over parts of Antarctica.

By the mid-1950s, many nations had active Antarctic interests, some commercial and some scientific, but generally political.  To help establish their claims, these nations raised their flags over multiple bases, believing their occupation supported their claims of territory.  Such was the political climate on the continent during the organizational years for the coming International Geophysical Year.

IGY, International Agreements, and Science Advances

A growing interest in Earth and atmospheric sciences during the late 1940s prompted the declaration of the International Geophysical Year (IGY). The IGY, which ran from July 1, 1957, to December 31, 1958, was timed to coincide with a peak level of sunspot activity.  Its objective was to study outer space and the whole Earth, with 66 countries participating from locations around the globe.  But the IGY left its greatest legacy in Antarctica.

Twelve countries - Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Chile, France, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, the UK, the U.S., and the USSR - established more than 40 stations on the Antarctic continent and another 20 on the sub-Antarctic islands.  Among these were the U.S. base at the South Pole, created through a massive 84-flight airdrop of 855 tons of building materials, and the Soviet Vostok station on the inland East Antarctic ice sheet.  Many countries also operated huge tractors to deliver large volumes of heavy cargo and fuel to deep inland sites across great sections of the continental interior.  The British expedition to first cross the continent overland (discussed above), occurred during the IGY.

For the 18 months of the IGY, a frenzy of activity, not only in Antarctica, but also all over the world and in space, resulted in a multitude of discoveries that revolutionized concepts of Earth and its oceans, landmasses, glaciers, atmosphere, and gravitational and geomagnetic fields. The combination of a moratorium on territorial claims in Antarctica, and the cooperative interchange between scientists of different nations during IGY, led to the creation of the Antarctic Treaty.

With the ending of the IGY, the threat arose that the moratorium too would end, letting the carefully worked out Antarctic international structure collapse into its pre-IGY chaos.  On May 2, 1958, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower proposed to the 11 other governments that were active during the IGY that a treaty be concluded to ensure a lasting free and peaceful status for the continent.  The Antarctic Treaty was signed on December 1, 1959.  With final ratification by each of the 12 governments, the treaty was enacted on June 23, 1961.

The Antarctic Treaty was an unprecedented landmark in political diplomacy: it reserved the entire continent for peaceful purposes and scientific research. The treaty also declared the continent as the world’s first nuclear weapon-free zone.

The many territorial claims that existed before the signing of the treaty were not abrogated by signatory nations, and new claims were prohibited.   

The treaty required periodic meetings of representatives of signatory nations to take up occasional problems.  Such meetings have agreed upon important measures for conservation of Antarctic flora and fauna and for the preservation of historic sites. The agreement also established that additional nations could be granted consultative status within the Antarctic Treaty.  This began in 1977 with the addition of Poland, followed by West Germany in 1981 and Brazil and India in 1983.  Several other nations have also acceded to the treaty and have been granted partial status.  As of 2015 the Antarctic Treaty had 29 consultative parties (including the 12 original signatories) and 25 non-consultative parties.

This map of Antarctica shows the location of some of the major research stations - identified with pink "dots."

  

Knowledge about Antarctica has increased greatly since the IGY.  Geologists, geophysicists, glaciologists, biologists, and other scientists have mapped and visited all of the continent’s mountain regions.  Until the 1970s, scientists relied on ground-based geophysical techniques such as seismic surveys of the Antarctic ice sheets to reveal hidden mountain ranges and peaks.  Advances in radar technology since then have resulted in airborne radio-echo sounding systems that can measure ice-thickness, which has enabled scientific teams to make systematic remote surveys of ice-buried terrains.  Satellites and other remote-sensing technologies have become key tools in providing mapping data.

In 1991, a convention among member nations of the Antarctic Treaty resulted in the adoption of the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty, now known as the Madrid Protocol. Entering into force in 1998, all mineral extraction was banned for 50 years and Antarctica was set aside as a "natural reserve, devoted to peace and science.”  The Madrid Protocol also regulated all activities of its signatories on the continent that may have an impact on the environment, including the introduction of non-native species, the building and management of research infrastructure, restriction of human access to certain areas, and regulation of human interaction with fauna and flora. In addition, it ordered the removal of all dogs from the continent.

In 2007-2008, international agencies sponsored the fourth International Polar Year (IPY) to bring renewed attention to Earth’s polar regions and their role in the global system.  The IPY comprised an intense, coordinated field campaign of observations, research, and analysis. It was the largest, most comprehensive campaign ever mounted to explore the Earth's polar regions.  The IPY led to new investments in research infrastructure and programs in Antarctica and further expanded the scope of Antarctic scientific programs, especially in terms of trying to understand global environmental change. 

Today, there are approximately 100 research stations in Antarctica, with about 60 being permanent and the rest are either temporary short term, or summer only, but still long-term stations.

Tourism

Organized commercial tourism to Antarctica started in the mid-1960s, when Swedish explorer and tour operator Lars-Eric Lindblad chartered cruise trips to Antarctica.  Sightseeing overflights by commercial airliners from Australia, New Zealand, and Chile were inaugurated in the mid-1970s.  Tourist overflights lost popularity, however, after the November 28, 1979 crash of a New Zealand DC-10 airliner into Mount Erebus on Ross Island, with the loss of all 257 passengers and crew (subsequently blamed on navigation errors).  

Overall, tourism increased to 45,000 people in the 2007-2008 season (November to March) and reached more than 56,000 in the 2018-2019 season.

Most visiting ships depart from South America, particularly Ushuaia in Argentina; Hobart in Australia; and Christchurch or Auckland, New Zealand. The principal destination is the Antarctic Peninsula region, which includes the Falkland Islands and South Georgia. Activities while on land include visits to operational scientific stations and wildlife sites, hiking, kayaking, mountaineering, camping, and scuba-diving. Excursions are always accompanied by seasoned staff members, which often includes an ornithologist, marine biologist, geologist, naturalist, historian, general biologist, and/or glaciologist.

Certain private expeditions may include visits to inland sites, including Mt. Vinson (Antarctica's highest mountain) and the geographic South Pole. An expedition can last anywhere from a few days to several weeks.

Emperor penguins in their natural habitat, one of the top tourist attractions in Antarctica.