Last wilderness on Earth

Antarctica is the world's last wild place. SIMON COLLINS investigates how long it can remain unspoiled

For about three million years, the Adelie penguins have lived a life which has hardly changed from one generation to the next. The little bird, about 60cm high, lives by the Antarctic seasons. In the six-month-long summer, each Adelie nests on the same windswept ice-free headland where its parents, and its parents' parents and their ancestors for thousands of years came.

Male and female partners take turns to sit on the nest and protect their egg while the other partner swims away to catch fish. After the chick has hatched, both parents may play in the sea with their offspring, teaching it to swim and fish.

Then, as the long summer turns gradually to the six-month darkness of winter, the rookery takes to the sea and moves northward, usually catching a ride part of the way with an ice floe where they shed their summer feathers. In the spring the cycle starts all over again. Somehow the penguins find their way 1000km south past icebergs and hard sea ice to find that rocky outcrop where they were born.

Almost everywhere else in the world, humans have interfered with similar natural cycles. Even when we have not taken over a species, such as sheep or cattle, we have cut down most of the habitat, or hunted it almost (as with the orange roughy), or completely (as with the moa), to extinction.

Penguin scientist David Ainley says Antarctica's Ross Sea, 2500km south of Bluff, is the last remaining sea that is still pretty much in its natural form. "All other areas of the world have been totally depleted of all top predators. Marine biologists have been surveying broken ecosystems," he says. "Here in the Ross Sea we have a chance to observe a complete system."

Ainley, a quiet American who wears a penguin cap and runs a website called penguinscience.com, has proposed that the Ross Sea should be made a marine reserve. For 25 years, Greenpeace, the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition (Asoc) have been calling for Antarctica to be reserved as a "world park".

But the idea was outflanked by a new environmental protocol to the treaty in 1991 which proclaimed Antarctica as "a natural reserve devoted to peace and science". Yet since 1991, fishing of Antarctic toothfish has been allowed in the Ross Sea for the first time under a 1980 Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR).

Permits for fishing boats rose from two in 2001-02 to six last summer, and about 30 boats have applied this summer. Tourist numbers visiting Antarctica have risen from 5000 in 1990 to 15,000 last year on land, plus around a further 5000 people on overflights. Russia and Chile have opened their bases to tourists and adventurers, arguing that revenue from visitors will help to pay for their scientific research.

More countries are seeking national bases. The Czech Republic has submitted an environmental impact report for a base on the Antarctic Peninsula, south of South America, and Estonia is preparing an application for a base on the western side of the Ross Sea. Antarctica New Zealand chief executive Lou Sanson says Malaysia has flagged its interest in a base, and Saudi Arabia has made inquiries.

Some welcome this opening up. In January, after a visit to Antarctica, Britain's Times journalist Simon Jenkins condemned the way that scientists claimed the Antarctic as their "exclusive reserve".

"No 'tourist' accommodation is allowed in Antarctica, except for scientists," he wrote. "A tourist photographing a penguin pollutes it. A scientist manhandling one does not. Tourist planes may not land at McMurdo Sound, yet military jets and Hercules roar overhead packed with scientists, spewing exhaust into the ozone." The awesome beauty of Antarctica should be for the world to share, he wrote.

In May, the New Zealand Government issued a policy stating it opposed "any expansion of permanent or semi-permanent land-based tourism in Antarctica", and would not support temporary expeditions apart from "humanitarian assistance and basic hospitality".

New Zealand has imposed a limit of 2000 visitors a year at the four historic huts built by early explorers Borchgrevink, Scott and Shackleton and administered by the Christchurch-based Antarctic Heritage Trust.

Visitor numbers at the most popular huts hit 1800 in 1999-2000 - about 1000 people from New Zealand's Scott Base and the nearby US McMurdo Station, and 800 from cruise ships. After that, cruise ship visitors dropped to only 120 last summer because of a big iceberg which broke off the Ross ice shelf in 2000 and has kept McMurdo Sound largely frozen.

Sanson, a former Antarctic field assistant who ran the Conservation Department's Southland Conservancy before taking the top job at Antarctica NZ last year, knows it is only a matter of time until the ice breaks up againand the limit of 2000 will be hit.

The Government appoints official observers on all New Zealand-based cruises, largely operated by Lyttelton's Heritage Expeditions Ltd. The idea will be among those discussed at a meeting in Norway next March on regulating Antarctic tourism.

"One of the systems proposed is government representatives on a range of ships but not every ship," Sanson says. "They are also talking about the use of management plans to set site limits or to set guidelines and regulations around what is off- and on-limits."

Sanson is sensitive to the charge of elitism, acknowledging that Heritage Expedition's cheapest Ross Sea cruise next summer will cost US$9950 ($15,537). He is looking for ways to use Antarctica New Zealand's education budget to take young people from less wealthy areas, such as South Auckland, to the ice.

New Zealand is treading carefully on fishing, after failing in 2001 to get Antarctic Treaty nations' approval for a proposed marine reserve around the Balleny Islands, just north of the Ross Sea.

Dr Alan Hemmings, a Canterbury University Erskine Fellow who chairs Antarctic committees for Asoc and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), said the proposal was seen as an assertion of New Zealand sovereignty in a region where all territorial claims are supposed to be on hold.

"It would have had a better chance if it had been a multi-state proposal including Russia, the US, Italy and maybe another fishing state," he says.

Sanson says New Zealand is "very encouraged" by a US National Science Foundation decision to fund Ainley to develop a full proposal for a multinational ecological study of McMurdo Sound.

He has invited a high-powered group of New Zealand marine decision-makers, including Prime Minister Helen Clark's top aide Heather Simpson, to meet Ainley and see the Ross Sea for themselves this week. "The Government's Statement of Strategic Interest is flagging that we need to put more into marine and biosecurity - what are the threats to the Ross Sea?" he says.

Clark's statement last year says New Zealand has an interest in "conserving, protecting and understanding the biodiversity of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean including promotion, protection and management of representative special areas". It supports research using the continent's "unique opportunities", and advocates "conservation of the intrinsic and wilderness values of Antarctica".

"In 50 or 100 years' time, my vision is that Antarctica will still be the largest and greatest wilderness on Earth," Sanson says.

Other countries do not seem so sure. Dr Neil Gilbert, former deputy head of the British Foreign Office's polar regions unit who is now Antarctica New Zealand's environmental manager, says Britain wants to regulate Antarctic tourism but has not set limits on numbers. Adventure Networks International has set up an airfield at Patriot Hills, south of the Atlantic Ocean, to fly people in to go skiing, mountaineering or sightseeing.

Hemmings says this year's CCAMLR meeting, held in Hobart last month, failed to agree on any of the proposals to tighten controls on illegal fishing of Antarctic toothfish. CCAMLR has only 24 members and works by "consensus", which allowed Russia to veto any official "blacklist" of boats involved in illegal fishing.

However, Hemmings says Asoc and IUCN back Ainley's proposal for a Ross Sea marine reserve. "Difficult as it is to argue for an area like that in the Antarctic, there is nowhere else on Earth that would be easier."

A World Parks Congress called for eight marine reserves in areas of the high seas, including one in Antarctica. It did not specify where they should be. "The international groundswell is towards establishing large high-seas marine protected areas," Hemmings says.

He hopes that the Norway meeting on tourism next March will also take the first steps towards a new protocol on Antarctic tourism. "If you look at how quickly the situation changed in the Himalayas or the Galapagos Islands, or even in Queenstown, you know that huge changes can occur within a decade or two," he warns.

"Within this generation we have to make choices that will determine whether the Antarctic continues to be a special place or it just becomes part of an increasingly globalised world."

On the ground, so far, Antarctica is still uniquely almost untouched by humans. Scientists huddle against the battering cold winds and driving snow in a few bases, huts and tents scattered over a vast continent. In most areas, tourists are still rare. The land is still almost entirely the domain of penguins and other native organisms, rather than people.

Fishing boats are now intruding into the surrounding seas, but it is not too late to keep them out of at least some marine areas. Penguins, toothfish, seals and whales may yet be allowed one corner of the oceans free from our interference - if we are willing to concede it.