17 February 2025
A collaboration between PhD candidate Kristin Wilson and illustrator Jean Donaldson. Edited by Jonathan Burgess.
If you travel south from Aotearoa New Zealand, you will eventually hit the landmass known today as Antarctica.
Antarctica wasn’t always there, at the bottom of the Earth. Over one billion years ago it was in the Northern Hemisphere, hanging out with India, Australia, and Laurentia (early North America). And before that? Well, we can’t trace back that far. But we do know that Antarctica’s oldest rocks are around 3.9 billion years old, meaning Antarctica has been around for most of Earth’s long life.
By 30 million years ago, Antarctica had travelled south and was isolated from all other landmasses, locked over the South Pole. Cooling and freezing followed, creating challenging conditions for Antarctica’s land-based life forms. Trees and vertebrate animals disappeared. Much smaller life forms such as springtails, mites, roundworms, and tardigrades, learned to adapt to the freezing temperatures, lack of running water, and seasons of extreme sunlight and darkness.
More than 99% of Antarctica is now covered by ice. In the ice-free locations, the ancient continent of gravel and rock is still visible. The Dry Valleys – near Ross Island – are the largest ice-free region (~4,500 km2). These deep U-shaped valleys hint at fjords long emptied.
It was not until the 1950s that Antarctica became part of the modern human world, in the lead up to the International Geophysical Year – a global scientific effort undertaken during 1957 and 1958. Research bases were built. Scientific programmes were devised and implemented. Charles Keeling began measuring monthly CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.
After the success of the International Geophysical Year, the twelve nations who had conducted research in Antarctica agreed to continue doing science there, to stop trying to agree who owned which part, and formalised this agreement in the 1959 Antarctic Treaty.
Today, Antarctica is one of Earth’s global commons. Like the high seas, the atmosphere, and outer space, Antarctica isn’t owned by any single sovereign state. The Antarctic Treaty has expanded to include 57 nations (as of 2024), of which 29 nations, who do “substantial research activity” in Antarctica make decisions annually.
Antarctica is governed in the “interests of mankind.” Yes, that includes you.
The stated environmental principles for governance include: peace, science, environmental, ecological, wilderness, aesthetic, and intrinsic values. These values are guides to support the overall goal of “the comprehensive protection of the Antarctic environment and dependent and associated ecosystems.”
Antarctica is a fragile and unique place, so there is cause for concern. In 1996, Warwick Vincent asked a difficult question, “can the scientific value of research activities be clearly justified against unavoidable impacts?”
The need to balance between different environmental principles in Antarctica and the importance of scientific knowledge to humankind is a reoccurring goal since – at least – the adoption of the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty in 1991.
What does ‘balance’ mean in reality?
In 1990, Elinor Ostrom cautioned against “relying on metaphors as the foundation for policy advice” as they lead to “results substantially different from those presumed to be likely.”
Complexity science, the field which studies complex phenomena, is interested in real-world puzzles like these.
From the perspective of complex systems, a balance (or an imbalance), is a description of the relationship between two or more things. In mathematical terms, either arithmetic or geometric, it refers to an equality.
Human preoccupations with determining, obtaining, and maintaining equalities appear in many concerns of life – health, economics, law, ethics, spirituality – and can be traced in history through ancient Egypt, classical Greece, the Middle Ages, to today. In Aotearoa New Zealand we recognise equality in the story of Goldilocks and the concept of utu.
In Antarctica, arithmetic logic is found in the linking of scientific and environmental values as scientific gains outweighing environmental impacts, formalised in an impact assessment process structured by increasing levels of environmental impact.
Complex systems are also dynamic systems, so balance takes on an additional meaning, referring to the stability (or instability) of a system overall. Understanding the processes of stability often takes centre stage, articulated through regulation, feedback loops, and emergence.
But what does balance mean in reality for Antarctica? We know that scientific knowledge is important to humankind, but every human activity there has an impact on its environment and ecosystems.
How do we balance Antarctica’s environmental importance to the planet with the importance of scientific knowledge to humankind?
Kristin Wilson has been exploring balance in Antarctica as a PhD candidate on Te Pūnaha Matatini’s Human activity in the McMurdo Dry Valleys – Rescue, knowledge and understanding our role as a vector of change project.
Jean Donaldson is a designer and illustrator who works with Toi Āria: Design for Public Good. She is based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. You can see more of her work at https://jeanmanudesign.com/.