The Antarctic Treaty nations have agreed a range of measures to regulate tourism in the region, including Visitor Site Guidelines. The guidelines help tour operators to manage tourist visits responsibly and sustainably, minimising the impact on the environment and wildlife.
They also apply to the staff of Antarctic operators when on recreational visits. Article 8 deals specifically with environmental impact assessments and sets out the procedures in the planning processes leading to decisions about any activities including science, tourism and all other governmental and non-governmental activities in the AT area.
In essence, the Protocol notes the importance of science but highlights the need for prior assessment of any impacts and for mitigation — the greater the impact the greater the in-depth assessment and the need for mitigation. One of the reasons tourists go to Antarctica is to see the wildlife and penguins are always a popular attraction.
For 12 years the British Antarctic Survey and the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust who operate Port Lockroy on Goudier Island, have been studying breeding performance in ten colonies of gentoo penguins, including pairs in sites visited by tourists and pairs of gentoos in colonies off the tourist trail.
The study at Goudier Island is a valuable long-term dataset. It is only with such long-term datasets using consistent methods that the impacts of controlled and regulated tourism can be found. The potential of tourism to impact on the marine environment is even greater than the potential impact on the land. The sinking of the MV Explorer near the South Shetland Islands in November highlighted the potentially disastrous human and environmental impacts of Antarctic tour operations.
All the passengers and crew were safely rescued but , litres of fuel and 24 tons of lube oil is probably still sitting at the bottom of the ocean and which will be gradually released into the marine environment. So far there has been no sign of pollution but the possibilities are still there. The Antarctic Treaty Consultative Parties are working towards greater control over tour ships in the area. At the ATCM in April , a Measure was passed banning ships carrying more than passengers from landing in Antarctica, and restricting other landings to a maximum of passengers ashore at any one time, with a minimum ratio of one guide to every 20 passengers.
In addition, the Treaty Parties have been working with the International Maritime Organisation IMO to prevent ships from carrying and burning heavy fuel oil in Antarctic waters. The ban will come into force in mid This will mean that large cruise vessels, which operate on heavy fuel oil, will not be able to sail in the area unless they use alternative, more environmentally-friendly, fuels.
In December , the International Maritime Organisation adopted revised guidelines for ships operating in polar waters and is now actively working on a mandatory Polar Shipping Code which is expected to be adopted in The Code will set compulsory standards for vessels intending to operate in the high latitudes. The UK already requires British cruise ships to demonstrate that they are not operating in isolation whilst in Antarctic waters and is continuing to encourage other Antarctic Treaty Parties to do likewise.
In the past many ships have wanted to be out there alone, selling this wonderful wilderness experience, but now the industry actively encourages vessels to cooperate with one another so they are able to provide assistance in the event of an incident. You have been given the following issues to consider: wildlife, vegetation, species introduction, litter, ships, adventure sports and historic buildings.
The Antarctic Treaty of governs activities on Antarctica. In , a protocol called the Madrid Protocol on Environmental Protection was put in place which sets out guidelines to help protect the Antarctic environment and its ecosystems from tourist activities.
Learn more about the guidelines that have been developed at the following websites:. As a journalist for a leading newspaper you have been asked to write a balanced news article or a report considering whether tourism in Antarctica is currently sustainable. An economic boom with side effects. Whales have been caught on a commercial scale in Arctic waters since the 17th century.
For example, whaling began on Spitsbergen in the year , only 16 years after the discovery of the Svalbard Archipelago by the Dutch seaman and explorer Willem Barents — In the early years, the hunters mainly stalked Greenland whales and the North Atlantic right whale. These species both have a thick fat layer and swim so slowly that the whalers could pursue them in rowboats and kill them with hand-held harpoons.
Unlike humpback or blue whales, Greenland whales and North Atlantic right whales do not sink to the seabed after dying. Instead, their bodies float on the surface, making it easy for the whalers to retrieve their prey. The blubber of the slain animals was boiled down and used in Europe as lamp oil and in the production of soaps. It is therefore not surprising that the Arctic whale stocks were heavily depleted by the end of the 18th century.
At this time, the first reports of large seal populations in the South Atlantic were beginning to circulate. The ships set a southerly course and began to slaughter seals on South Georgia half a century before the discovery of the Antarctic continent.
They started by hunting the Antarctic fur seal Arctocephalus gazella. There was a lot of money to be made from their valuable furs in North America, Asia and Europe. Soon afterward the elephant seals were added as prey. They were slain for their thick, oil-rich layer of fat.
During the next ten years, expanding from South Georgia, the seal hunters discovered new hunting grounds on the South Atlantic island groups, from the region of the Scotia Arc to as far as the South Shetland Islands near the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. At the same time, in the southern Indian Ocean, the ships advanced to the Kerguelen and McDonald Islands, where they mainly hunted the Subantarctic fur seal Arctocephalus tropicalis.
After 20 more years of radical hunting the most important hunting grounds for southern fur seals were practically depleted. Nevertheless, the hunt for these animals did not cease until around Only a few hundred to a thousand of these two species survived in some inaccessible island bays. The hunt for elephant seals had already slackened 30 years earlier because the demand for seal oil had fallen with the introduction of petroleum as a preferred lamp oil.
The exact opposite has occurred with the large whales of the Antarctic seas. Their slaughter gained pace in when the first land-based station for whale corpse processing was constructed in South Georgia.
With the introduction of these factory ships it was no longer necessary to bring the whale corpses to land stations for processing. Equipped with this technology, the whalers killed significantly more animals in less than 80 years of hunting in the Southern Ocean than were slain in years of whaling in the Arctic Ocean.
The idea of protecting whales first began to slowly take hold only after the end of the Second World War. Although the catch of blue whales declined due to a population collapse, whalers in the Antarctic waters began to hunt more fin whales and sei whales and, beginning in , the much smaller minke whales. Whaling for commercial purposes was not banned until , when a moratorium was adopted for the protection of large whales in response to strong public pressure.
It went into effect in , but is being circumvented by countries such as Norway, Iceland, Japan and South Korea. Resource extraction in the polar regions The more accessible the polar regions become for people, the more frequently questions arise about the deposits of raw materials there and how they can be used.
Around the world the demand for oil and gas, metals and rare-earth elements is increasing, and with it the price and the willingness to invest more money in exploring for them, especially in the Arctic region. However, resource extraction from areas that are poorly developed and difficult to access involves many incalculable factors that drive up costs and thus the investment risk, and which in the past have already led to the abandonment of extractive activities and plans.
Incalculable factors relating to resource extraction in the Arctic include: Lack of infrastructure in the Arctic results in long development times: Up to 17 years can elapse between the discovery of a deposit and the start of production. And even then, the remoteness of mines or production platforms will continue to pose problems for companies. For example, Chinese mining companies investing in Greenland complained that they could only bring their employees to the site by helicopter, which increased operating costs enormously.
Difficult climatic and weather-related conditions: Extreme temperatures, strong winds, mobile sea ice and the instable Arctic permafrost grounds are difficult to predict and require the use of special and expensive technology. Mines, streets, railways and buildings have to be protected against the thawing ground. Offshore facilities such as oil platforms and tankers must endure the constantly changing ice conditions.
Long and sometimes difficult transport routes: The production sites are very far away from the consumers. High personnel costs for specialists willing to work in the inhospitable and remote areas. Geopolitical developments: Raw-material exploration in the Arctic requires technology and expertise that a state alone cannot usually provide. Because of the ice cover and the extremely low temperatures, at which oil residues break down much more slowly than in warmer regions, many experts consider the environmental risks to be inestimable.
Public pressure: Complaints or campaigns by environmental organizations and the local populations can delay or even prevent the approval processes for exploration operations in the Arctic region. For instance, in April the Norwegian parliament withdrew approval of a planned oil and gas drilling project in the waters around Lofoten.
The decision followed global campaigns by environmental organizations such as SeaLegacy, which warned of the consequences of resource extraction for the environment, fisheries and tourism. Geological conditions Experts distinguish between mineral raw materials and hydrocarbon deposits, or energy resources.
The former category includes metals and minerals such as iron ore, uranium, gold, diamonds and many others. The latter refers to natural gas and oil. The distribution of these raw-material deposits in a region depends primarily on the plate-tectonic history of the area.
The three large and geologically very old Canadian, Baltic and Siberian continental shields, for example, are situated in the vicinity of the Arctic Ocean. These are composed primarily of crystalline rocks, but also contain some sediment series, and their ages range from one to 2. The prevailing geological conditions were conducive to the formation of mineral raw materials such as gold, copper, iron ore, molybdenum, lead, zinc, platinum, nickel, diamonds and rare-earth elements.
Oil and gas deposits, on the other hand, are more likely to be found in Arctic areas where rivers and seas once deposited sediments over millions of years, producing sediment layers several kilometres thick. This has taken place over the past million years, primarily in the shelf regions.
In some areas, the shelf layers contained abundant organic material, which is a necessary condition for the formation and concentration of oil and gas. The weight of the ice cap forces the Antarctic continent downward, so that the sea floor of the continental shelf in large part lies at a depth of more than metres.
If production were allowed, oil companies would have to invest a great deal of time and effort in drilling for oil and gas there. Energy resources in the Arctic Oil and gas have been produced in the Arctic region for decades.
Around ten per cent of the oil and 25 per cent of the gas production worldwide is now taking place in the Arctic region, although it comes almost exclusively from deposits on land. For the Arctic states, the development of oil and gas reserves in their northern territories is already vital or is becoming an increasingly important economic sector.
For example, Russian natural gas is being delivered to Germany, which receives a full one-third of its natural gas from Western Siberia. Indeed, many possible deposits have not yet been discovered. It found that 90 per cent of the probable reserves are located in only ten of these areas. The possible oil and gas deposits are thus concentrated in just a few regions.
Furthermore, the amount of probable natural gas is three times as great as the expected amount of oil. Of these, the richest oil areas are off the north coast of Alaska and in the Arctic waters off Canada and Greenland.
According to the study, two-thirds of the probable reserves lie in the Eurasian part of the Arctic region and the remaining one-third are in the North American part. Russia is at the top of the ranking for the Arctic states richest in these resources, with about half of the yet undiscovered deposits. To date, the USGS study is still the only Arctic-wide survey of possible oil and gas reserves and, due to its methodology, it is fraught with large uncertainties.
In many areas the estimates of the American scientists are based on very vague geological information. For many parts of the Arctic region there is simply not enough data.
Researchers therefore expect the estimates to change significantly as new geological data become available. Furthermore, the authors point out that their statistical calculations did not take into account either the technological and economic conditions or possible exploration risks.
For this reason it is very likely that a substantial portion of the presumed reserves will never be developed or produced. Furthermore, detailed knowledge of a reservoir does not necessarily mean that it will be exploited. Throughout the Arctic region there are many reserves that have been known for 40 to 50 years but have not yet been developed for economic or environmental reasons.
In Russia, on the other hand, resource production also has strategic and political significance. A strategy paper by the Russian government considers resource exploitation in the Arctic to be an essential basis for the social and economic development of the country.
The export of crude oil and products produced from it accounts for over 50 per cent of total Russian exports. The Russian government is therefore promoting the exploitation of resources, for instance through tax incentives. Large state-owned corporations such as Gazprom and Rosneft dominate the industry. They produce natural gas and crude oil in far more areas than is done in North America, for example.
The number of production facilities continues to increase. In April , following a meeting with President Vladimir Putin, the Russian oil company Rosneft announced that it was planning to develop several oil and gas fields in the Russian Arctic, which would make it possible to recover 1.
It has also begun to build accomodation for the expected 20, workers. These include major projects already underway such as large oil- and gas-production sites on the Yamal Peninsula and in eastern Siberia. Construction of the harbour terminal and the accompanying industrial facilities and buildings will cost around 21 billion US dollars, and additional funding is being provided in part by Saudi Arabia, the French oil company Total, and Japanese commercial companies.
The industrial complex, with an annual capability of The list of investors is indicative of the increasing international cooperation in the exploration and exploitation of raw materials in the Arctic region. Because oil and natural gas production in the northern polar region is technically difficult and involves enormous costs, even experienced players such as Rosneft, Gazprom and Novatek depend on cooperation with American, European and Asian companies.
In the USA, the Trump administration is now pushing ahead with the sale of oil-drilling licences in the once-protected coastal area called the Area of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — for example, by allowing the administration to carry out required studies on the impacts of oil exploration within a very short time.
Caution would be advisable here. Because of its climatic and geographic situation, the Arctic is a high-risk region for economic activities, especially for major projects such as oil and gas production. Accidents and risks cannot be ruled out even when the mining and oil companies comply with environmental regulations and employ modern safety technology.
There is always a danger of degrading the environment with oil pollution, garbage and noise, all of which are especially damaging in the Arctic. This is particularly so in the case of tanker accidents or pipeline leaks, because oil and other hydrocarbons remain in the ecosystem much longer due to the low temperatures.
Experts also agree that measures to remove oil slicks or spills in the Arctic are very difficult and protracted, if not impossible. They say that clean-up techniques that have proven useful in other regions are less effective or even useless in Arctic waters.
Ice could clog the oil suction systems, or oil booms could freeze. During the polar night, darkness would also hamper any clean-up operations. This means that there is a lack of the important infrastructure and personnel necessary to rapidly and effectively combat an oil spill in the event of an accident along the Arctic coast.
Mineral raw materials in the Arctic While the mining of mineral raw materials is prohibited in Antarctica by the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty, mineral resources such as coal, zinc, copper, gold, diamonds, platinum, nickel, palladium, iron ore and rare-earth elements constitute important economic branches in many regions of the Arctic, or they are considered to be a basis for future economic development, as in Greenland.
Since the discovery of diamond deposits in the Northwest Territories, for example, Canada has become one of the top five diamond producers in the world.
The largest zinc mine in the world, called Red Dog Mine, is located in Alaska. It has the largest known zinc deposits on Earth to date and alone accounts for ten per cent of the global production of this metal. The development of mineral raw materials in the Arctic region has a long history. The iron ore mine in Malmberget, Sweden, in the Lapland region, opened in and is still the second largest in the world.
In Greenland, minor amounts of copper, lead, zinc, silver, gold, marble, graphite, olivine and cryolite have been extracted since the middle of the 19th century. Beginning in , the goldrush on the Klondike River attracted more than , gold prospectors to Alaska and flooded the world market with gold.
Just two decades later Russia began construction of its largest mining and metallurgy complex in the Siberian Arctic Norilsk mining district in the Krasnoyarsk region. Because of the unfiltered emissions from metallurgical plants, Norilsk was for a long time a city with one of the highest levels of air pollution in the world. Today the mining of mineral raw materials in the Arctic still takes place exclusively on land and is therefore less affected by the consequences of climate change as it relates to diminishing Arctic sea ice.
There are at present slightly over 20 mining operations that are extracting mineral resources. At least , birds and mammals died as a result of the oil spill, and fishing activity came to a standstill. The coast is still polluted with oil today. When ice masses melt, the meltwater streams and rivers transport large amounts of sediment to the coasts where they are then deposited.
As a raw material, sand is in demand worldwide, and its export could be economically viable if the mining can be carried out in an environmentally sustainable manner. In conjunction with these activities, according to the Arctic Economic Council AEC there is a lot of prospecting taking place in the Arctic in order to find out exactly where, and especially how abundantly the raw materials occur.
It has been known for years, for example, that there are very large deposits on Greenland. Of particular significance here are gold, platinum-group metals, rare-earth elements, uranium and celestine. Economic planners and a large proportion of the Greenland population hope that the mining of minerals will generate large revenues in the future, and that the island will become an important supplier in the long term.
The necessary mining licenses have already been issued, including some to Chinese mining companies. But so far a number of factors have prevented profitable large-scale mining because Greenland, like other parts of the Arctic, still lacks important infrastructures like roads, railways, harbours and housing for the mine workers. The average temperatures on the icy island are so low that the extraction of mineral resources is only possible during the short summers.
In addition, Arctic sea ice often blocks the paths of transport ships to mining sites such as the Citronen Fjord in the far north. Furthermore, the Arctic states have agreed in the Arctic Council to develop their Arctic territories as sustainably as possible. This means that every country now imposes requirements on mining companies with regard to environmental protection, occupational health and safety, and interaction with the local populations, all of which drive up exploration costs.
There is presently only one producing mine. The Norwegian company Greenland Ruby has been extracting pink rubies in Aappaluttoq in southwest Greenland since May and selling them in the form of jewellery to Greenland tourists and on the Scandinavian market.
The Canadian company Hudson Resources, Inc. It intends to mine calcium-rich feldspar anorthosite in the White Mountain region of Kangerlussuaq Fjord in western Greenland and sell it to fibreglass producers. Production of the industrial mineral, however, will only be possible during the short summer, so it is questionable whether the mine will be profitable over the long term. In other parts of the Arctic, on the other hand, the exploitation of natural resources and development of the necessary infrastructures are progressing rapidly.
According to the plans, this volume will double when further construction phases are completed by The mine operator Nussir ASA estimates the copper deposits in the area at 72 million tonnes.
There is no larger copper deposit known in Norway. According to the mining company, however, it is also presumed to have the second largest copper deposits in the world as well as large amounts of gold, silver, molybdenum, palladium and rhenium.
Shipping in the Arctic The drastic decline of Arctic sea ice, especially to the north of the Russian coasts and in Alaskan waters, is opening new shipping routes that may be of interest to operators from Arctic countries as well as to many companies from outside the Arctic region.
In areas where the sea ice completely disappears, or where it is only present in winter, possibilities are opening up: Vessels can venture into previously untapped fishing grounds. Drilling ships or platforms can exploit the marine gas and oil deposits that were previously not accessible. Travel companies can attract new customers with cruises in the Arctic. On the contrary, large parts of the northern polar region were developed by ship. An example of this is the sinking of the MS Explorer within the Drake Passage on the 23rd November after colliding with an iceberg.
Whilst all crew and passengers were saved, the environmental impacts of this can still be seen today. As the vessel sank, it released petroleum, oil and lubricants to be released into the ecosystem [], causing devastation to its wildlife. She has been working as a website assistant for the AntarcticGlaciers.
Benjamin is a recent geography graduate from Royal Holloway University of London. Polar Record. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Quark Expeditions vessel and two penguins. Derek Oyen. Group of penguins on sea ice. Danielle Barnes.
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