From the Antarctic: Building a highway to the Pole

By SIMON COLLINS, science reporter

A convoy of American vehicles passed near New Zealand's Scott Base yesterday on its way to survey a new road to the South Pole, raising the pressure on the world's last great wilderness a notch.

Bulldozers and other vehicles carrying huts, tanks and heavy equipment stretched across the horizon, moving slowly southward from the main United States Antarctic base at McMurdo Station.

The controversial US plan for the 1400km ice road - still officially subject to consultation with other nations - is designed to reduce the need for flights to the Pole.

Airplanes pump out carbon dioxide and other pollutants and carry a risk of accidents.

In the past year alone the United States made 293 polar flights, supplying workers and equipment to rebuild its research base, which sits on top of the Pole.

The current dome-shaped base will be dismantled when the new, more utilitarian structure is finished in 2007.

But the ice road will create exhaust fumes from land vehicles and bring its own risks to travellers braving the continent's harsh and unpredictable weather.

Ninety-two years after Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen led the first successful expedition to the Pole, the vast majority of Antarctica is still as bare and pristine as he found it.

Seventy-four research stations from 24 countries are largely strung around the edge of the land mass.

Their total summer population is still less than 4000 people in a continent that is almost twice the size of Australia.

In winter, the continent doubles in size at the maximum extent of the sea ice.

Ninety-eight per cent of it is covered in permanent ice sheets, which contain 90 per cent of the world's fresh water.

The stormy Southern Ocean which surrounds it sets up ocean currents which not only cool Antarctica itself, but also influence the world's climate as far north as Europe and the North Pacific.

For New Zealand, Antarctica is one of our closest neighbours, roughly as far south of Bluff as Sydney is west of Auckland.

We share a common heritage geologically, in the great southern continent of Gondwanaland, and biologically.

Canterbury University zoologist Bill Davison has helped to trace the family tree of Antarctica's unique range of cold-adapted fish species to an original New Zealand ancestor called the thorn fish.

For almost 50 years after Amundsen, people largely stayed away from Antarctica, deterred by the climate and the cost of getting there.

But the first permanent research bases were established in the 1950s, and today even nations as poor as India and as tiny as the former Soviet state of Estonia feel that true nationhood somehow demands a presence near the South Pole.

Rising affluence and cheap air travel have lifted the number of tourists from fewer than 1000 a year in the 1980s and 5000 in 1990 to more than 15,000 last year.

Most tourism focuses on the Antarctic Peninsula, which stretches north towards South America.

Legal and illegal fishing operations last year caught about 50,000 tonnes of Antarctic toothfish, worth around US$300 million ($476 million).

New Zealand fishing companies alone earned $14 million from the trade.

In addition, researchers from several countries, although not yet New Zealand, are scouring Antarctica's unusual lichens, animals and fish for new chemicals and proteins which may prove useful for medicine or industry.

Others are monitoring the Antarctic environment for warning signs of global climatic changes.

On the Antarctic Peninsula, average temperatures have risen by 2.5C in the past 50 years, driving at least one cold-adapted species, the mackerel ice fish, further south for cooler weather.

So far warming has been less noticeable in other parts of the continent.

But if the higher temperatures spread, the South Pole road may be the least of the environmental threats that face Antarctica.

* Herald science reporter Simon Collins and photographer Mark Mitchell are in the Antarctic with Antarctica New Zealand. They are filing reports on what we are learning from scientific research. At the weekend they will look at the human impact on the frozen continent.