The huge, resource rich territory China will snatch while the West dithers

The Royal Navy’s single ice breaker, HMS Protector, is forward-based in the Falkland Islands, hardly a buzzing international hub themselves. From there, you have another 1000 miles to sail across the roughest water on earth: the “Furious Fifties” themselves. Vast, oceanic swells circulate clockwise around the planet without interruption before being whipped into a frenzy by the narrowing and shallowing of the Drake Passage – the gap between Cape Horn and the Antarctic peninsula. When you take your ship into the Passage, eating, sleeping and getting around the ship all become problematic, often for days at a time.

You can shorten the crossing to about 600 miles from Ushuaia or Punta Arenas or lengthen it from Christchurch, Hobart or Cape Town but the fundamental problem doesn’t go away – you’re in an extreme environment with limited possibility of help if things go wrong. Of course, ships of all sizes have operated, sailed and fished down there for centuries now, so it can be done, it’s just not for the faint-hearted and there have to be sound economic reasons to make the risk worthwhile. The old clipper ships, who exploited the furious western winds of the far south to move cargoes fast, mostly stayed in the slightly more civilised “Roaring Forties”: they only dipped into the Fifties to pass the Drake Passage.

Once you have got through the terrible high southern latitudes – or indeed, as you start to get through them – ice starts to become an issue, at first drift ice and then the Antarctic shelves. Icebreakers are not the only option when it comes to sustained operations down there but they are a large part of it. The US Coast Guard and Royal Navy have just three ageing hulls between them, four if we include the research ship Sir David Attenborough.

HMS Protector does great work down there on behalf of the Foreign Office (base inspections), the British Antarctic Survey (science and research) and the UK Hydrographic Office (charting) but can only be in one place at a time. Even within the Royal Navy, which provides the ship’s company, His Majesty’s ice patrol ship is a distant anomaly. Given well-published tensions of manpower and funding elsewhere in the service, the likelihood of buying another one to allow for concurrent tasking down there – or better still, ‘one south and one north’ – is exactly zero. The US Coast Guard is at least investing in new hulls as part of the Polar Security Cutter program.

Flying to Antarctica is possible and has been for decades but it requires special skills, special hardware and special support services. And as ever with flying, if you want to do anything substantial at the other end, that’s going to be a challenge.

So the Antarctic Treaty has endured and expanded, due partly to its wisdom and partly because defying it, in practical terms, is hard to do. However, when working down there, one always had the sense that as soon as Antarctica’s vast resources become economically worth the risk of exploiting, this would change. We may be seeing the start of this now. 

There are no prizes for guessing who is leading the charge. China only recently built its fifth base in Antarctica ‘for scientific purposes’ without submitting the environmental evaluations required by the treaty. The base was built in three months. The US still has the largest footprint on the continent, but the Chinese one is growing the fastest. American, UK or South Korean bases are not used for military purposes, spying or listening. I know this because I’ve been in them.

For now, the only vaguely exploitable resource in the Antarctic is sea life. On land, one day, there are minerals and fossil fuels: but for now the environment is too hostile to go there to get those. But sea life has long been exploitable: much of the large-scale industrial whaling of the 20th century took place in the Antarctic.

Today, in line with their global modus operandi of sending fishing fleets far and wide, China has a fleet of ‘super trawlers’ in Antarctic waters exploiting the vast quantities of krill and other fish knowing that regulation is nearly impossible and claiming ‘research’ if challenged. In 2019 China attempted to claim control of Dome Argus, the highest point of Antarctica and perhaps the coldest place on Earth – between the mountains there and the ice sheet on top of them, the surface is at an altitude of more than 13,000 feet. Dome Argus sits squarely in the Australian slice of the pie. This was blocked, but for how long?

Russia is likewise expanding its footprint on the continent and conducting fishing as the vessels involved go dark or spoof their location on various tracking systems. People fishing legally don’t do this.

The Southern Ocean is not only inhospitable, it is huge. It is officially defined as “waters south of 60 degrees South”. To put this in perspective, 60 degrees North cuts through the top of the Shetland Islands. Imagine having to police everything north of that. We struggle to monitor illegal fishing in UK waters … or stop boats in the Channel.

Iran, not one of the 54 signatories or one of the 29 with voting rights but never far behind when an opportunity to cause mischief presents itself, announced last autumn its intention to build an Antarctic base – and claiming ‘property rights’.

The first question is ‘does any of this matter?’

I would say it does, not just because of the requirement to preserve the environment there but because of the way allowing these activities encourages still more. Regardless of the Treaty, presence and activity may well translate into ‘property rights’ in the real world one day.

Non-compliance with international law and the rapid build-up of dual-use civilian/military installations in the South China Sea and the Arctic are better known examples of this. General interference with energy and communications infrastructure is another and actively blocking choke points in the Black and Red Seas is another.

These have all been happening for years but have accelerated recently because we failed to either deter in the first place or then act when that failed. In other words, it matters because it is part of a general pattern of behaviour that is designed to stretch (our) resources in the short term and provide (them) strategic economic benefit in the long term, and only early and decisive decision-making will stop it. 

Question two. Does all this matter enough for countries to invest in the apparatus there to regulate it?

This would require a coherent strategy underpinned by an uplift in people, inspectors, ships and mechanisms for enforcing the treaty. The likelihood of this happening is low. If political and financial constraints make achieving consensus in Ukraine, Gaza, the Arctic and the China Sea (amongst many others) hard to come by, what chance is there of overcoming these impediments in the remote, inaccessible Antarctic?

In the meantime, we are left with small groups of determined politicians, diplomats, influencers, scientists and mariners doing what they can to help and inform. Inevitably it seems, larger groups of people are now seeking to disrupt, stretch and exploit the soft edges of the treaty and this will only accelerate in the absence of a meaningful deterrent. 

Soft power only goes so far – eventually, you have to do something or the high ground (literally in this case) is lost. 

Tom Sharpe is a former Royal Navy officer who commanded four different warships. One of them was the icebreaker HMS Endurance