If you ever wanted to convince someone of the fundamental importance of quarrying, look to Antarctica.
The Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty (also known as the Madrid Protocol), signed in 1991, banned mining in the Antarctic region indefinitely. The only exception to this protocol is for quarrying – under very strict guidelines and controls.
The only mining activity conducted in Antarctica to date has been for earthworks to construct buildings, power stations, roads, runways and digging of pits to study sediments and soils. In short, if humans are to have a presence on this vast continent, we need quarries.
It seems that humans today cannot do too much without the extensive use of bits of rock.
The Madrid Protocol will be reviewed in 2048, but even prior to this protocol, no country had planned prospecting and exploration work for oil reserves or mineral deposits in the region. One reason for this is of course the extreme difficulty of operating in this region. Apart from the extreme weather and the isolation, there are the vast quantities of moving ice and glaciers as well as the huge depth (up to 5 km) that would be required to drill to reach the possible resources. But improving technology and climate changes may well reduce the importance of these issues.
So who decides what can and can’t be done in Antarctica?
Antarctica is governed by a coalition of nations that have signed the Antarctic Treaty – fifty-four of them. Each year Antarctic Treaty nations meet to discuss Antarctic matters. At these meetings, all parties can participate in discussions about the management of human activities on the continent, but all decisions are made by consensus among the “consultative” parties (i.e. those nations who conduct regular scientific research in the region – currently 29 in total). To date the Antarctic Treaty has proved to be an unprecedented example of international diplomacy. It is this body that must approve any quarrying activity.
While there are 29 consultative nations who conduct regular research in the region, there are currently only seven countries maintaining a proprietorship on territories in Antarctica – Norway, Australia, France, New Zealand, Chile, Argentina and the UK. Interestingly, Russia, China, and the US have no claim (so far) in the Antarctic. Remember that not having a claim does not mean these countries (and others) cannot work there. Of these claims, Australia’s is by far the largest – 6 million square kilometers, 42% of the entire continent.
As you can imagine, quarrying in such an isolated place with its adverse weather conditions is very challenging. Gavin Hartley from Blackhead Quarries in New Zealand wrote an excellent paper on this issue in 2020 (which was awarded the IoQ Caernarfon Award in 2021). The project was set up to provide aggregate for the Antarctic Infrastructure Modernisation for Science Project (AIMS) for the United States Antarctic Program (USAP). The US program is based in McMurdo Station which is in the New Zealand claimed Ross Dependency.
The main message from their experience was that while logistics are critical, the most important component is the people chosen for the project – they have to live and work in very close proximity for quite long periods and there is no way to get away from each other! Apart from that, the weather decides when you can or can’t do something – when they say weather, they mean essentially the wind.
Part of the logistics revolves around minimizing the environmental footprint of the operation – and they take things very seriously. For example, there is a fire department there which is charged with handling spills, and spilling the equivalent of a cupful of almost anything will trigger an emergency response! As an aside, imagine running a fire department in a place where water is almost non-existent.
The other point of course is that this (or any other) quarrying project is for one specific purpose only. Stockpiling material is not an option, and the reason is not immediately obvious. In the Antarctic, any stockpile will quickly freeze, and processing frozen rock is very problematic. Even quarrying itself faces this problem. After the drill and blast operations have finished, the rock to be processed is only taken from the top 200mm or so, simply because everything below that level is frozen hard and too difficult to process, even during the summer months.
Some trivia about the Antarctic that we found interesting:
- “Arctic” is from the Greek word for “bear” because “the greater she-bear” (the Big Dipper) is always visible in the northern sky. The word “Antarctic” literally means “opposite the bear”. By pure chance, it turns out that polar bears only live in the north, not the south. So the Antarctic really is the land without bears.
- The Antarctic holds most of the world’s fresh water – up to 90% in fact.
- In spite of this, the Antarctic is a desert. The average annual rainfall over the last 30 years is only 10mm.
- But the Antarctic Peninsula is one of the most rapidly warming areas on earth. With all that fresh water locked up, the impact of this warming can be imagined.
- There is no Antarctic time zone – all the different lines of longitude (which give us the various time zones) converge here. People working there generally use the time zone of the country they depart from – imagine the confusion this could generate.
- Related to this – no matter which way you look, every direction is north.
- Antarctica has its own flag – it features a plain white map of the Antarctic continent on a pale blue background.
No matter how you look at it, the Antarctic is a fascinating place. The result is that many of the people there at any one time are essentially tourists (even many specialists) – they just want the experience of working in Antarctica.
