|Ice averaging 2,160 m (7,085 ft) in thickness covers more than about 98% of the continent of Antarctica, which has an area of 14 million sq km (5.4 million sq mi). There is no indigenous human population, and there is no land-based industry. Human activity consists mainly of scientific research. The 45-nation Antarctic Treaty is the managerial mechanism for the region south of latitude 60° S, which includes all of Antarctica. The treaty reserves the area for peaceful purposes, encourages cooperation in science, prescribes environmental protection, allows inspections to verify adherence, and defers the issue of territorial sovereignty.|
In 2003 representatives of the Antarctic Treaty nations finally reached consensus on creating a permanent secretariat in Argentina. The measure was to take legal effect after all the parties ratified it. Because of the immediate need, the representatives agreed to get the secretariat working, using voluntary contributions after the selection of an executive secretary in 2004. Antarctic Treaty membership had grown from the original 12 nations to 45, and Malaysia expressed interest in achieving membership and sent investigators to Antarctica and observers to the 2003 consultative meeting, which was held June 9–20 in Madrid.
The International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators reported that 13,571 tourists landed in the Antarctic in the 2002–03 summer on privately organized expeditions—most of them aboard commercial ships. Four nations—the U.S., Germany, Great Britain, and Australia—accounted for 73% of the travelers. This was a big increase over the 2001–02 season, which had had 11,588 tourists. The association expected tourism to increase again in 2003–04.
In August an Australian military ship, after a 21-day chase, seized a Uruguayan-flagged boat on suspicion of poaching Patagonian toothfish (usually marketed as Chilean sea bass), which were protected in Antarctic waters by an international convention. Australian customs officials said that the boat was carrying 85 metric tons of the fish, which can grow to 2.2 m (7 ft) in length. The crew members were taken to Fremantle, Australia, where they faced fines and jail. Harvesting the fish remained legal under a permit system, but illegal, unreported fishing was thought to exceed the allowed limit severalfold and to threaten depletion of the stock in a few years if it was not stopped.
The ozone hole covered much of Antarctica (and beyond) in the austral spring of 2003 and thus permitted ultraviolet radiation from the Sun to reach the surface in increased amounts. At 28.75 million sq km (about 11.1 million sq mi), the 2003 ozone hole was the second largest on record. The World Bank reported that global consumption of chlorinated fluorocarbons had dropped from 1,100,000 tons in 1986 to 150,000 tons in 1999. The international decision to cut the production of man-made chemicals that cause the ozone hole and lesser stratospheric ozone depletions worldwide had been made in 1987, when stratospheric chemists based at McMurdo Sound showed that the chemicals caused the ozone hole. The Bank said that without the changes dictated by the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer (1987), consumption would have reached 3,000,000 tons by 2010.
Scientists from Canada and the U.S. reported that their modeling studies found the Antarctic ozone hole to be responsible for the observed spring and summertime warming in the Southern Hemisphere over the past 40 years. The work helped to quantify the possible influence of the stratosphere (where the ozone hole occurs) on weather and climate. Increased circumpolar westerly winds also were blamed on the ozone hole. The scientists said that their work showed that human emissions of ozone-depleting gases had affected surface climate over the past few decades.
According to a 2003 report based on a study of rock samples collected at Graphite Peak, the collision of a meteorite with the Earth was the cause of a global mass extinction 251 million years ago that exterminated more than 90% of the world’s living things. The event was the biggest of Earth’s so-called Big Five mass extinctions documented in the geologic record. The finding was based on samples collected in the Antarctic in the mid-1990s, and some scientists considered it controversial because they believed that weathering during the 251 million years since the meteorite struck would have made the rock samples unreliable. Scientists returned to the Antarctic in late 2003 to search for more samples that might help resolve the criticism.
Australian researchers studying chemical evidence from ice cores taken at Law Dome reported that Antarctic sea ice, which was stable from 1840 to 1950, had decreased sharply in area since then. The decline of about 20% was not uniform, and the data were focused on the area of the Southern Ocean south of Australia, but the investigators said that their findings lengthened the history represented by the short period that had been monitored by satellite imagers and strongly suggested that the total sea-ice extent around Antarctica had been in decline since the 1950s.
Argentine and British scientists published a report in 2003 in which they suggested that the Larsen Ice Shelf on the east coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, which had lost massive sections in 1995 and 2002, was a model for what could happen to larger ice shelves farther south. Earlier work had indicated that regional warming and surface melting over the past several decades were the main causes; the new report gave more weight to ocean warming. A report by American and British investigators on the complex science of ice dynamics found that “a major West Antarctic ice stream discharges by sudden and brief periods of very rapid motion paced by oceanic tidal oscillations of about 1 metre” per hour.
Ancient Antarctic life was the subject of two unusual studies reported in 2003. According to a report in the New York Times, Lake Vida in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, which was covered by 18.3 m (about 60 ft) of ice, yielded bacteria that froze at about the time that Rome was founded and were successfully brought back to life. Scientists reported in Nature magazine that they had discovered the fossil of a fly 500 km (about 310 mi) from the South Pole, which went against the long-held belief that these insects never inhabited the continent. The fly had lived there between 3 million and 17 million years ago.