Conflicting claims could stir a battle for Antarctica's riches
It appears frozen in time, an icy world surrounded by frigid seas where winds of 100 m.p.h. are not uncommon. No human is known to have set foot upon it until the 19th century, and even today it exposes unwary travelers to the greatest dangers. Temperatures regularly plunge to —100° F or below. Giant crevasses can open in the ice, swallowing men and machines. Sudden storms often blend ground and sky into one snowy blur that hopelessly disorients the most skilled aviators.
During his doomed dash to the South Pole in 1912, British Explorer Robert Falcon Scott was right enough when he called it this "awful place." But Antarctica, half again as large as the continental U.S., is also a world of spectacular beauty. Beyond its great central plateau, where the ice is more than two miles thick, are towering mountains, volcanoes, and glaciers as big as Rhode Island that creep inexorably toward the sea at rates up to two miles a year. There are even curious, snow-free "dry valleys" where the winds have sculpted the rocks into a phantasmagoria of surreal shapes.
Though Antarctica gets less precipitation than the Sahara (less than 2 in. a year), nearly two-thirds of the world's fresh water is locked up in the polar icecap. Even bacteria are barely able to cling to life in the interior, but the coastal regions abound with seals and penguins, to say nothing of the whales that come from round the world to winter in Antarctica's icy, protein-rich waters.
This forbidding continent has lately become more than the testing ground for explorers in mukluks and wooden sledges. It is being eyed acutely for mineral wealth, once deemed far too difficult and expensive to mine. Geologists have already confirmed that it holds great quantities of iron and coal, including perhaps the world's largest coal field, running more than 1,500 miles along the Transantarctic Mountains. There are strong indications of other treasures as well. More than 200 million years ago, before the world's continents began their slow drift apart, Antarctica was attached to South America, Africa, India and Australia as part of a great landmass that scientists call Pangaea (Greek for whole earth). In strata similar to those of its long-separated continental cousins, Antarctica, like the tip of South America and southeastern Australia, may possess uranium.
During the six-month austral, or southern, summer, when the South Pole is bathed in sunlight 24 hours a day, geologists from the U.S., Australia and New Zealand explored the rocky mountains of Northern Victoria Land. They found signs of such valuable metals as tantalum and lithium, used for making high-strength alloys. The Dufek Massif in the Pensacola Mountains, similar to South Africa's Bushveld, may have platinum and chromium, both strategic metals.