Antarctica, as defined by the 42-nation Antarctic Treaty that entered into effect in 1961, comprises all lands and waters south of latitude 60° S. The land area is about 14.2 million sq km (5.3 million sq mi), principally the Antarctic continent itself and adjoining islands. Ice averaging 2,160 m (7,085 ft) in thickness covers 98% of the continent. There is no capital or permanent human habitation; scientific and support personnel, housed in some 40 year-round scientific stations, number about 4,100 in summer and about 1,000 in winter. Antarctica is effectively internationalized by the Antarctic Treaty, which places the territorial claims of seven countries (Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, New Zealand, Norway, and the United Kingdom) in abeyance for the duration of the treaty. The treaty also provides managerial mechanisms for regulating international affairs, scientific activity, environmental protection, and formal inspections to verify compliance.
Meteorites collected in Antarctica and studied separately by two research teams yielded evidence that primitive life may once have existed on Mars. U.S. investigators announced their findings in August and based them on the study of a meteorite found in 1984 in the Allan Hills area of Antarctica. The meteorite had formed on Mars approximately 4.5 billion years ago, and an impact 16 million years ago knocked it into space, where it wandered until it crashed into the Antarctic ice sheet 13,000 years ago. In October a U.K. team that had used different study methods and another Mars meteorite--found in 1979 in the Elephant Moraine region of Antarctica--announced additional evidence that pointed to the possibility of primitive life’s having existed on ancient Mars. The Elephant Moraine rock, which formed an estimated 175 million-180 million years ago and was blasted off Mars some 600,000 years ago, is much younger than the ore found in the Allan Hills. If these findings were confirmed, they would mean that life could have existed on Mars as recently as 600,000 years ago. "Geologically speaking, this is sufficiently recent for there to be a good chance that life might still exist in protected areas on our planetary neighbour," the U.K. team concluded.
These two 1996 reports highlighted the value of the study of meteorites in enabling scientists to learn about the solar system. Half the world’s known meteorites had been found in the past 25 years through systematic searches on Antarctic ice fields. Six of the world’s 12 meteorites known to have come from Mars and 10 of the 12 meteorites from the Moon were collected in Antarctica.
Antarctica’s ozone hole appeared headed for another record season; in November it was nearly as big as the U.S. and Canada put together. Of greater import, however, assessments published in 1996 showed that the hole would soon cease to exist because controls had been imposed on industrial production and the use of chemicals that destroy stratospheric ozone. The atmospheric abundance of one of those chemicals, chlorine, peaked in 1994 and was still on the way down in 1996, and a computer model showed that the ozone layer could begin recovering by the end of the 1990s. According to Charles Jackman of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, ozone should begin recovering by 2000 and return to 1979 levels--the year the Antarctic ozone hole became obvious--by about 2050. This prediction would hold, however, only if the chlorine controls were maintained.
Research in 1996 continued to point to Antarctica’s complex involvement in global climate change. Confirmation by several research teams of ancient sea-level fluctuations led to increased attention to ice sheets, the only mechanism researchers believed could have caused the biggest of the swings. Though such sheets seemed unlikely to have existed in the warm climate that prevailed before about 50 million years ago, Princeton University scientists examined deep-sea sediment records and concluded that there may have been an Antarctic ice sheet despite overall climatic warmth. In addition, California Institute of Technology investigators working with scientists from Taiwan showed that high dust concentrations in ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica during the last glacial maximum (18,000 years ago) indicate that the tropics could have been much cooler than other data suggest, also supporting the existence of polar ice sheets. British Antarctic Survey scientists concluded that the large-scale retreat of Antarctic Peninsula ice shelves during the past 50 years was a sensitive indicator of climate change, but they said that the retreat may have resulted from only regional, rather than global, warming and that larger ice shelves farther south were not immediately threatened.
In mid-January a brief near-freezing rain broke a 24-year drought at McMurdo, a U.S. research station in Antarctica, one of the world’s driest regions. Meteorologists theorized that a patch of calm air over McMurdo Sound warmed snow that blew in from the ocean, turning it to rain. Temperatures at McMurdo, 1,350 km (840 mi) from the South Pole, can reach above freezing in January, the height of summer.
Tourism increased again in the 1995-96 Antarctic summer, continuing a trend that began in 1990. Shipborne tourists numbered an estimated 9,212. Perhaps 100 tourists landed by airplane, and additional sightseers were aboard commercial flights that did not land in Antarctica. Of the shipborne tourists, 37% were from the United States. Germany, the U.K., Japan, and Australia also contributed significant numbers.
Fisheries in Antarctic waters during the 1995-96 reporting year (July 1 to June 30) landed 104,498 metric tons, of which 91% was krill (Euphausia superba). Of the 10 nations that participated, Japan led with more than half the catch; the other substantial fishers were Poland and Ukraine. This catch continued the modest annual increases since 1993, but it was well below the haul for the years up through 1990-91, when the breakup of the Soviet Union resulted in the disbanding of its subsidized long-distance fleet.
Bill Green, a geochemist at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, won the John Burroughs Medal for his book Water, Ice, & Stone: Science and Memory on the Antarctic Lakes. Three European scientists--Willi Dansgaard of the University of Copenhagen, Claude Lorius of the French Institute of Polar Research, and Hans Oeschger of the University of Bern, Switz.--won 1996’s prestigious Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement for their pioneering analyses of climate change recorded in the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica.
The U.S. National Science and Technology Council, chaired by Pres. Bill Clinton, determined in an April report that the nation should continue its "active and influential presence in Antarctica, including year-round operation of South Pole Station." The report responded to a congressional request for a review of the cost and benefit of the U.S. Antarctic Research Program (administered by the National Science Foundation) and of post-Cold War Antarctic policy. In another decision, President Clinton in October signed into law the Antarctic Science, Tourism, and Conservation Act of 1996, which authorized the U.S. to ratify the 1991 Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty.
This article updates Antarctica.