In 1977 an American businessman began importing a new fish from South America to the U.S.: a monstrosity with leathery lips and a mouth evolved for sucking up prey in the blink of an eye -- the kind of looks you'd expect of a fish that lurks in the dark, as deep as 13,000 feet. Slicing the fish into skinless fillets relieved it of its appearance, and the businessman erased its last vestige of ugliness by changing its name from Patagonian toothfish to Chilean sea bass.
The fish was a hit in restaurants, prompting fishermen to look for it in other places. Their attention eventually turned to a closely related species, the Antarctic toothfish, which inhabits the world's southernmost waters. Commercial harvesting of Antarctic toothfish began in 1996, in Antarctica's Ross Sea.
Vessels fishing for toothfish carry scientific observers and are tracked by GPS; and a few fish are tagged and released in order to monitor the population. All this makes it "one of the best managed, most sustainable, environmentally benign fisheries in the world," says Martin Exel, a senior manager at Austral Fisheries, a company based in Perth, Australia, that fishes for toothfish.
But Arthur Devries, a marine biologist at the University of Illinois in Urbana, sees another story unfolding. In dozens of visits since the 1970s to McMurdo Station, the main U.S. Antarctic base, he has studied toothfish in the Ross Sea. Each day while there, he rode a snowmobile several miles out onto the sea ice covering McMurdo Sound. He fired up a winch and hauled 1,500 feet of cable and fishhooks up through a hole in the ice. He often found a dozen toothfish snagged on the hooks; he tagged and released most of them.
"We could catch them in great numbers and did so for 30 years," he says -- but no longer. Dr. Devries caught not a single fish in the summer of 2006. He and his students have caught only a couple dozen toothfish since then -- less than a tenth of their previous catch -- and the fish are smaller. "The fishing industry must be taking enough of the population so that they don't come into McMurdo Sound in the numbers they used to," he says.
The current health or peril of the Antarctic toothfish population remains unresolved. So does the fundamental question of how much the world's most pristine waters should be fished, period, and that is becoming a political problem. In November, a proposal to set aside 500,000 square miles more of the Ross Sea as an unfished preserve was vetoed by Russia, Ukraine, and China.
Telltale signs suggest that the southern continent holds other resources, whose discovery could pose difficult political questions.
Glint of gold lures a helicopter to land
Laura Crispini first glimpsed one of those signs out the window of a helicopter passing low over the Bowers Mountains in Antarctica on Dec. 8, 2005. The helo was following a ridge of greenish rock rising above the glaciers when she spotted a band of yellow-white stone slicing across it.
Dr. Crispini, a geologist from the University of Genoa in Italy, had come here to map tectonic faults -- but the discovery of this particular fault would have implications beyond basic science. She asked the pilot to land, and she scrambled with a co-worker down the ridge, past bands of white quartz and iron-rich carbonates many feet across. Near the center of the white zone she saw a metallic glint in the rock: narrow, stringy veins of gold, pure and soft enough to dint with her pocketknife.
The veins had formed millions of years before as superheated water and carbon dioxide, from thousands of feet below, spurted up like espresso through cracks, leaching trace amounts of gold from the stone along the way. The fluids cooled as they rose, and the gold that had accumulated in them coalesced into metallic crystals.
Antarctica may hold plenty of mineral resources. Three hundred million years ago, it lay at the center of a supercontinent, Gondwana, which also included South America, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Folding of Earth's crust caused plumes of magma and superheated fluids to rise, concentrating minerals near the surface of Gondwana: copper, tin, silver, lead, and zinc along what are now the South American Andes; and gold, copper, lead, zinc, nickel, and cobalt in southeastern Australia.
"Just by extrapolating, you might expect that Antarctica should have geology similar to those other continental areas," says John Goodge, a tectonic geologist at the University of Minnesota Duluth. He and others have reconstructed the jigsaw puzzle of Gondwana to identify where these same mineral-rich belts cut through Antarctica.
Harsh climate and ice cover pose extreme barriers to profitable mining in Antarctica, but this hasn't stopped the topic from coming up. In the 1980s a group of nations including the US and Russia sought to negotiate a framework within the Antarctic Treaty that would permit drilling and mining. But it was vetoed by France and Australia, and a ban on mining and drilling was adopted in 1991; it runs through 2048. But that may not be the end of it.
"The question of mineral exploitation hasn't gone away in Antarctica," says Anne-Marie Brady, a specialist in polar politics at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.
As the Antarctic Treaty has grown in recent decades, some nations eager to join it and build bases in Antarctica appear to have long-term interest in the continent's mineral and energy resources. A number of countries fall equally within this category, including Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, China, Korea, and India -- but as a Mandarin speaker, Ms. Brady has performed an especially large number of interviews and reviews of government documents in China. "The mainstream point of view" in China, she says, "is that it's only a matter of time that Antarctic minerals and energy resources will be exploited."
Conditions in Antarctica will be tough, but rising commodity prices and improving technology may eventually make it worthwhile, says Brady: "People whom I've talked to in China about this issue, they're confident that the technology will be worked out."
These discussions of resources fly beneath the radar, confined to a country's native language, but signs surface now and then. For example, there were reports published in 2013 by Ukrainian scientists prospecting for offshore natural gas in Antarctica. If minerals or hydrocarbons are harvested even decades from now, the land claims, human settlements, and symbolism employed by countries like Argentina and Chile will make sense. "It builds up arguments for a future that the Antarctic Treaty will be renegotiated," Avango says of a time when territory claims that the treaty put in limbo could well be revived.
The U.S. has no territorial claim in Antarctica but maintains the right to make one in the future -- and has by far the largest research footprint there: McMurdo Station alone houses 20 percent of the continent's 4,400 summer inhabitants. McMurdo is nourished by a tenuous lifeline: Two ships each summer deliver 7 million gallons of fuel and 10 million pounds of food and supplies. The ships could never make it if not for an icebreaker that clears a path through six feet of sea ice choking McMurdo Sound. But from 2006 to 2013, the U.S. possessed only two functional icebreakers -- forcing it to hire vessels from Sweden and Russia for this vital task. And in October, the U.S. Antarctic Program faced an undignifying setback as the government shutdown disrupted cargo flights and summer preparations at McMurdo -- canceling or postponing research projects that had been planned for half a decade.
Every nation that hopes to play a role in shaping the future of the poles -- whether for exploitation, territory, or conservation -- will require certain strategic assets: scientific research that maintains prestige and expertise; well-placed ports, airfields, and research bases in the polar regions; experience landing and launching large military cargo planes on glacial ice; and, of course, icebreakers. Negotiating a future for the poles will take decades, beyond the oft-shortsighted view of politics, elections, and funding cycles. But the outcome of that process could be profound, influencing the world's political, economic, and environmental order for a century to come.
Douglas Fox is a northern California based science and environmental writer whose work has appeared in the annual anthology "The Best American Science and Nature Writing," as well as in The Christian Science Monitor, National Geographic, Nature, and Scientific American. His last trip to Antarctica -- a two-month expedition in 2013 with scientists looking for life in subglacial Lake Whillans -- was funded by the National Science Foundation.
