To Fight Climate Change, Our Laws Need to Focus on Ice – and Who Protects It
Image source: Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica" sourced through Creative Commons HERE
By Ruth Elizabeth Morris
No one owns Antarctica – sort of. But climate change activists should lobby for international law to more clearly define ice structures and laws that govern them.
The modification date for the 1959 Antarctic Treaty is fast-approaching, and with it, the likelihood of jurisdictional squabbles. Seven countries have sovereign claims to portions of Antarctica: Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, New Zealand, Norway, and the United Kingdom. The claims from Argentina, Chile, and the United Kingdom overlap significantly, and many treaty participants do not recognize any claims of sovereignty at all. This is for good reason, as for the last half-century Antarctica has been reserved for peace-keeping missions and freely accessible international scientific research, and the Antarctic Treaty expressly forbids any single country from ownership or development of the land.
For climate change activists seeking legal incentives to limit environmental destructions, nowhere is more important than Antarctica. However, because Antarctica is currently governed by a soon-to-be modifiable treaty and sovereignty is ultimately unclear after 2048, determining which governments are best equipped to pass laws protecting Antarctic land is tricky. Ultimately, it is not even the land mass itself that needs protecting: it is the ice.
Around Antarctica, a reliable current more than 2 miles deep and 1200 miles wide circles the lower half of the Southern Hemisphere. The Antarctic Circumpolar Current carries water around the globe, moving water thousands of miles and infusing ecosystems with the critical bionutrients they need to thrive. It is also one of the world’s best defenses to rising ocean temperatures, pulling cold water from deep waters in the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans and delivering that water to overheating surface areas that need the chill to try to remain balanced. This process (called “upwelling”) has regulated ocean temperatures for centuries, through a variety of earth’s subtly shifting climates.
As ocean temperatures rise, ice shelves in Antarctica are melting exponentially faster than recent centuries. Miles-thick ice-cover that seemed previously unshakeable is retreating from the sea at a rate that is alarming scientists. As global warming increases surface temperatures of the ocean faster than upwelling can cool them down, sea ice in Antarctica is melting from below.
Of particular concern to scientists is the Thwaites Glacier. Comparatively close in size to Florida, this rapidly-melting glacier holds enough water to raise sea level by 2+ feet, lowering temperatures overall as it does so. Researchers at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder call the Thwaites Glacier the “wildest glacier in the world” because of its quick-melt and unpredictable impact on the melt-speed of surrounding glaciers. As warming sea temperatures dissolve Thwaites from below it creates fractures in its connection to an underwater mountain that steadied Thwaites’ ice flow and slowed its melting speed – until now. The risk of Thwaites’ collapse and subsequent collapse of other nearby ice sheets is no longer a matter of ‘if’ to scientists studying Western Antarctica, it is a matter of ‘when.’
Upwelling alone is not enough to slow warm water melting glaciers from below. In fact, as strengthening southern winds increase upwelling patterns, it has its own devastating effects on our already delicate weather patterns. Upwelling does bring cold water from the deep to the surface – but that cold water carries centuries of carbon that, if released into the atmosphere, will contribute further to greenhouse gas emissions already warming our planet.
As scientists learn more about the ways glaciers function (and break or melt), they have more persuasive evidence for lawmakers who litigate policies designed to slow or remedy climate change. Specifically, scientists can point more directly to measurable evidence of rising sea levels and lobby for legislature that prioritizes preserving polar ice shelves. However, jurisdiction over ice sheets is murky at best.
Ultimately, the best way to protect ice sheets in Antarctica is through a macro-approach that slows glacier-melt by reducing overall carbon emissions contributing to global warming, and a micro-approach that perpetuates the soon-to-be-modifiable policies in the Antarctic Treaty which forbid drilling and other economically beneficial activities in the Antarctic that compromise the integrity of the ice shelves.
Just as the realities of complex international governmental relationships do not lend themselves to neatly defined climate solutions, the geophysical realities of Antarctic ice formations do not lend themselves to neatly defined sovereign claims. Ultimately, for the ice to be preserved, we must also preserve the Antarctic Treaty.