LONDON, Jan 25: “GREAT God! This is an awful place,” wrote Captain Robert Falcon Scott when he reached the south pole on January 17 1912. Tom Avery, a 27-year-old finance director with a ski company, had a similar reaction when he reached the pole at the end of December last year. But it wasn’t the cold and isolation that chilled him; it was the gift shop.
“We had walked 700 miles and from 12 miles away we could see the big American base at the pole,” he says. “When we got there, we found a gift shop, which had a sale and was selling half-price ‘I reached the south pole’ T-shirts.” Avery, who has revered Scott and fellow explorer Ernest Shackleton since he was eight, wasn’t buying, not even at knockdown, new-year prices. Nor was he too impressed by the insignia at the pole itself: a plaque commemorating the race between Scott and the Norwegian Roald Amundsen (the latter won and the former lost his life on the way back to base) and a large stars and stripes marking the fact that the US now controls the south pole and is building a new base there.
This week it emerged that the US is also planning a 900-mile road, linking the pole with the town of McMurdo on the coast. That prospect worries those who see Antarctica as the last great wilderness. “With the road will come tourism and pollution,” says the Green party’s international spokesman, John Norris.
At present, such fears are overdone — this will not be a road in any conventional sense. It will be made not of tarmac but of snow and ice, and will be usable for only 100 days a year. “It wouldn’t be for lorries,” says Dr Karl Erb, head of the US Antarctic programme. “It would be more like a train — ten or so coaches pulled by a purpose-built tractor.” He says that because it would still take ten days to reach the pole and there will be no stopovers — the coaches will have self-contained cooking, sleeping and sanitary facilities — there will be no encouragement for either tourism or construction.
Erb insists that the US has no interest in developing tourism. “We tread a fine line as far as tourists are concerned,” he says. “We don’t say ‘y’all come’, but if they do turn up we offer them a coffee and a shower.” There is no hostel at the base — exhausted trekkers have to sleep in their tents.
There is, however, already an easier way to get to the pole — by planes on skis. Avery is dismissive of those who take the easy option. “People pay US dollars 25,000 to fly to the pole just to say they’ve been there,” he says. “They are there for about four hours and spend most of the time in the gift shop.”
The high-rollers and trekkers are just the tip of the iceberg. It is estimated that 20,000 tourists a year now visit Antarctica — mainly people taking cruises around the coastline. “I was at (the British) base at Rothera recently,” says David Blake, head of technical services with the British Antarctic Survey, “and an icebreaker called the Klebnikov appeared. It was on a 66-day circumnavigation of Antarctica and each of the passengers — Americans, Britons, Australians, Chinese — was paying pounds sterling 800 a day.” Blake says that the tour was behaving responsibly — passengers were disinfected when they came ashore to avoid contaminating land or wildlife - but doubts whether the continent can cope with mass tourism.
Blake does not condemn the road out of hand, however, pointing out that it would at least reduce the environmental damage caused by the aircraft currently flying between McMurdo and the pole. Avery is less sanguine: attached to the romantic legacy of Scott, he imagines some future party trekking across the wilderness and suddenly seeing a lorry go past. “If you’re on a polar expedition and a truck rumbles past, it’s going to be a bit of a letdown,” he says with Scott-like understatement. “At the very least, I hope they don’t use the Beardmore route, which was the one followed by Scott and Shackleton. There are other glaciers through the mountains which a road could follow.”
When Avery reached the pole, he was the youngest person to get there on foot, following a 45-day, 700-mile trek. In interviews, Avery’s father praised his son’s “stiff upper lip” — a lip that was extremely stiff since he was suffering from frostbite. But it would have been understandable if it had quivered a little when his record was broken five days later — by 23-year-old Andrew Cooney, a scout leader and British army reservist. “I hold a Duke of Edinburgh gold award, but I was looking for something bigger,” said Cooney endearingly when he reached the pole. He also commented on Antarctica’s remarkable whiteness.
“The record was a bit of a nonsense really,” says Avery bravely. “The real reason for doing it was to commemorate the expedition by Scott and Shackleton in 1902. We were celebrating their achievement in almost getting there.” Scott was his boyhood hero — famed for not quite being the first man to reach the south pole. Amundsen got there ahead of him on December 14 1911 and lived to tell the tale; Scott reached the pole a month later and didn’t, though he left a heart-rending diary to inspire later generations.
The pathos of Scott’s final diary entry has echoed down the years: “I do not think we can hope for any better things now. We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far. It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more.” No wonder schoolboys wanted to retrace his frostbitten steps.
The contrast between exploration then (isolation, individual endeavour, likely death) and now (corporate sponsorship, likely appearances on 24-hour news programmes, cellphones) is, of course, stark. So much so that even Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Britain’s best-known explorer, says that there is now nothing left to explore except space.
Sara Wheeler, who has written widely on the Antarctic, has no time for modern-day adventuring. “I find it a bit of a yawn,” she says, “seeing how dead you can get, skiing down a crevasse on your willy — it’s all a big testosterone thing. The most important thing about Antarctica is that it is unowned — it remains unowned no matter how many countries make a claim. We have to respect and cherish that. It is not significant if people create ice runways, which is what this ‘road’ is, in effect. It is a step towards possible exploitation but that is a long way off. If the signatories of the Antarctic treaty are vigilant, there is no imminent danger of exploitation.”
The treaty, ratified in 1961, ended decades of great-power scrambling in Antarctica. Nazi Germany, seeking some extra Lebensraum, lodged a claim in 1939, and in the 1950s the continent was a battleground for the US and the Soviet Union. The US grabbed the south pole, with all its historical resonance; the Soviet Union, as usual getting the worst of the exchanges, took Vostok, the central point in Antarctica and the coldest place on earth. The UK also grabbed a chunk and issued British Antarctica stamps to back its claims.
The treaty, signed by the 12 countries then active in the region, agreed to demilitarise Antarctica, establish it as a zone free of nuclear tests and radioactive waste, set aside disputes over territorial sovereignty and promote scientific cooperation. There are now 27 “consultative parties” to the treaty, including not just the US, UK, China and Russia, but Belgium, Bulgaria and Peru, too. Each has a scientific base in Antarctica and at least seven — including the UK, Chile, Argentina, Norway, France, Australia and New Zealand — still make territorial claims, though these are effectively “frozen” under the terms of the treaty. Russia and the US, which once claimed four-fifths of Antarctica on the basis of visits by 19th-century whaling captains, reserve the right to make claims in the future.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.