by Anthony Megna

Created on: April 25, 2009   Last Updated: September 10, 2011

Antarctica is the last great "pristine" continent sitting at the bottom of our world. A cold, windy, beautifully desolate place that has attracted explorers and scientists for 150 years. Today, Antarctica is used primarily for scientific research and a lot of knowledge has been gleaned from this great continent. But sooner or later, some country will try to exploit it for it's riches. Why not do it properly and with great care?

Antarctica is loaded with natural resources and minerals such as iron ore, gold, nickel, copper,chromium, and platinum among others. According to the Antarctic Treaty, mining is prohibited. But that could change as the world demands more and more metals to feed a hungry industry and for technology.

Extreme care would have to be taken if any sort of mining were to take place on this frozen land. The ecosystem is just too fragile there, even though not many living things are native to Antarctica. Penguins come to mind, but they live primarily on the coast and the Weddell Sea. The question is, does it make economic sense to invest the time and money to work there?

Being as remote as possible, with drastic weather, six months of darkness and extreme wind and cold, it would take a hardy company and even hardier individuals to actually work in the mining industry in this frigid wonderland. The temperature for cold set a record at the Russian Vostok Station on July 21, 1983 at minus 128.6 degrees. That is almost incomprehensible. Although that is extreme, the mean temperature is below zero everywhere.

If proper precautions were to take place, then maybe, just maybe a small trial run of mining could happen. But even to do this, the Antarctic Treaty would have to be renegotiated. That is a task in and of itself! Take a look at the United Nations and their poor record of getting anything done and multiply it by infinity. Argentina and Chile have still been fighting over a piece of Antarctica, and those two countries are part of the Treaty.

In summary, if countries could work out their differences and draw up another treaty allowing mining then that would be a start. But the real question is, is it worth it? The vast investment and the hostile environment just doesn't seem to make sense unless we completely run out of natural resources on the rest of the earth. It seems like it might be easier to mine an asteroid than to cut through the spider's web of bureaucracy in order to get a pick in the ground down there.

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