Fifty years on: putting the Antarctic Treaty into the history books

摘要

Recent media coverage of the threatened collapse of the vast Wilkins ice shelf highlights the manner in which the established focus on global warming and the ozone hole has led Antarctica to be well and truly accepted as playing an integral role in global environmental systems. By contrast, histories of the 1950 and 1960s continue still to treat Antarctica largely as, to quote Philip Quigg (1983), 'a Pole Apart', that is a marginal region struggling for inclusion on most world maps. Despite the occasional newsworthy item, like the 1952 Anglo-Argentine clash at Hope Bay (Beck 1987: 18-21) or the 1955-1958 British Trans-Antarctic Expedition (Fuchs and Hillary 1958), Antarctic affairs have not been regarded, except perhaps in Argentina, Australia, Chile and New Zealand, as sufficiently mainstream during the 1950s and 1960s to warrant inclusion in national or global histories covering that period.