Text Fwd: S. Korea selects site for 2nd research base in Antarctic

* same as the link below

Yonhap News
010/03/17 13:23 KST
S. Korea selects site for 2nd research base in Antarctic
kokobj@yna.co.kr

SEOUL, March 17 (Yonhap) -- South Korea said Wednesday that it has selected a site for a second research station in the Antarctic, paving the way for the nation's intensifying drive to conduct scientific research in the frozen continent.

The selection is based on analysis of data collected by South Korea's first icebreaker Araon during its recently-ended three-month exploration around the region.

"Based on the results of thorough analysis and opinion gathering from government and private-sector experts, we have decided to build our second research base in Terra Nova Bay located near the Ross Sea on the southeastern tip of the Antarctic," the Ministry of Land, Transport and Maritime Affairs said in a press release.

The region was chosen over the once strong candidate site of Cape Burks as it has easier accessibility and greater operational convenience, as well as being better positioned for global cooperation with research bases run by other countries, it noted.

The research base will be built on a floor size of 3,300 square meters, located 74 degrees south latitude and 164 degrees east longitude. More than 100 billion won (US$88.3 million) is expected to be spent on its construction.

The ministry said that it will submit related documents detailing its construction plan in mid-March to the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, which groups international observers and experts and provides guidelines on the management of the region. Construction of the base is expected to be completed in April 2014.

The selection comes more than two decades after South Korea opened its first Antarctic research base, joining other nations in securing a better footing in the continent deemed to hold an abundant amount of natural resources and a key to the global issue of climate change.

South Korea has been running the King Sejong Base, located on King George Island near the northern part of the continent, since 1988.

Currently, 20 countries are running or are in the process of building 39 bases in the South Pole, while only eight of them including the United States run more than two research bases there.

"We expect the construction of the second base to help us emerge as a global powerhouse in researching the polar regions," the ministry said.

"It will also help us conduct more diverse basic research that has not been easily done in the past, such as research on the upper atmosphere, glaciers, meteorites, the continent and continental shelf," it added.

The second base will consist of five buildings which could accommodate up to 60 people. All the facilities will be built using eco-friendly materials and moved to the South Pole after being assembled here in South Korea, the ministry explained.

The government will start a bidding process within this year to pick a builder to spearhead the construction. The first phase of construction will start in 2013 after all necessary preparations including design are complete, it added.


* Related article

Yonhap News
Chronology of events related to S. Korea's selection of 2nd Antarctic base
2010/03/17 11:07 KST

Text Fwd: NATO Of The South: Chile, South Africa, Australia, Antarctica

* StopNATO*
NATO Of The South: Chile, South Africa, Australia, Antarctica
May 30, 2009, Rick Rozoff

Two days ago Carolina Toha, spokeswoman for Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, stated that "Chile has developed strategic ties with the United States since long ago" and expressed her government's eagerness to expand them. [1]

Employing the standard rationale of sharing "more similarity with the Obama administration" than with its predecessor, a pose adopted by world politicians of all stripes since the US presidential election of last November 4th - including conservatives like France's Nicholas Sarkozy - the Chilean statement could be seen as nothing more than desiring to be on the winning side and to curry favor with the new Planitarchus (lord of the planet), as Greek demonstrators who curtailed a proposed three-day visit to Athens in November of 1999 of Obama's predecessor once removed, Bill Clinton, described the post of US president.

Even if so, however, Chile's stance is at variance with the prevailing trend throughout South and all of Latin America, with nations like Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Argentina and most recently El Salvador moving away from a "special relationship" with Washington, especially in the military sphere, and promoting multilateral international ties, notably defense agreements with Russia and a general orientation toward new multipolar international security and economic arrangements.

An equally revealing news report surfaced two weeks ago concerning an agreement signed by the foreign ministers of Chile and the Czech Republic on creating a legal framework for cooperation in Antarctica, to which Chile lays both longstanding and expanding claims.

The Czech Republic is no ordinary European nation but a post-Cold War zealot, full of new convert fervor, devotedly serving American and NATO interests in the Eastern and Central sections of the continent and acting as the intermediary for Washington and Brussels in several international capacities, from waging information and diplomatic offensives against countries like Belarus and Cuba to offering to host US third position interceptor missile radar and providing troops for the war in Afghanistan, there serving under NATO (International Security Assistance Force) and direct US (Operation Enduring Freedom) commands.

A battle royal is in progress for securing control over the vast Antarctic region and its hitherto untapped oil, gas, mineral, fresh water and fishing resources and potential. The Antarctic's strategic military value is increasing in importance commensurately, as is that of the Arctic Circle on the opposite end of the earth. The subject has been explored in an earlier article in this series, Scramble For World Resources: Battle For Antarctica. [2]

The four countries directly north of the Antarctic Ocean are Chile, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand and all four are to varying degrees being integrated into Western military alliances; all four have bilateral military ties to the United States and with other NATO states, three directly with NATO itself.

With Britain filing a claim with the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf on May 11th of this year for one million square kilometers of the South Atlantic and Antarctic Oceans and Australia being granted 2.5 million more square kilometers in the Antarctic Ocean by the same UN Commission last year (the Australian Antarctic Territory takes in 42% of Antarctica) the region is now arguably one of the most closely contested territorial - and resource and strategic - disputes in the world.

Seven countries have formal claims to Antarctica: Three NATO states in Europe, two British Commonwealth nations in the South Pacific and two South American countries, respectively Britain, France and Norway; Australia and New Zealand; and Argentina and Chile. The Argentine, British and Chilean claims all overlap at places.

Peru, Russia, South Africa and the United States have reserved the right to future claims on Antarctic territory and Brazil has designated what it refers to as a zone of interest in the region.

Of the seven official claimants, five are members of what is generally considered the Western world, geography aside, leaving only Chile and Argentina as rivals to them.

Read More

Text Fwd: Scramble For World Resources: Battle For Antarctica

* Text Informed at Stop NATO

Rick Rozoff, May 16, 2009
Scramble For World Resources: Battle For Antarctica

The Arctic and Antarctica are the last vast untapped
reservoirs of mineral resources on the planet. [1]

If the expansion of Australia's territory is
formalized, this will disrupt the operation of
international legal mechanisms, which have already
been seriously affected by the proclamation of
Kosovo's independence.

Worse still, this will open the door to a large-scale
re-division of the world. The South Pole precedent
could be applied in the North Pole, which will turn
the struggle for the Arctic resources into a global
war, inevitably involving Russia. [2]

May 13th of this year marked the deadline for "states to stake their claims in what some experts are describing as the last big carve-up of maritime territory in history," Reuters reported in October of 2007. [3]

At the time the British Foreign Office announced that it was submitting a claim to expand the nation's Antarctic territory by a million square kilometers and would also submit "four other claims...for Atlantic seabed territory around South Georgia and the Falkland Islands and also around Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, near the Bay of Biscay in the North Atlantic, and in the Hatton-Rockall basin off Scotland's coast." [4]

Prior to 1962, the British Antarctic Territory was a dependency of the Falkland Islands and also included South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands.

On March 31 of this year Britain made a partial submission to the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf regarding the Hatton-Rockall area in the Northeast Atlantic (Rockall is a miniscule craggy isle, though one with strategic significance way out of proportion to its size), which gives the country its only claim to the Arctic shelf that is estimated to contain a fifth of the world's undiscovered oil and nearly a third of undiscovered natural gas.

London started talks with Iceland, Ireland and Denmark (in its capacity of owner of the Faroe Islands) to jointly use Rockall to penetrate the Arctic in the impending scramble for its resources, a subject that has been explored extensively in another study in this series [5]

In a parallel but far grander move, on this May 11 Britain submitted its claim to the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf for the one million square kilometers it covets in the South Atlantic reaching into the Antarctic Ocean.

This was the formalization of plans initially revealed in October of 2007 and described in a press report of the time as a plan to "extend British sovereignty in Antarctica," a zone which "covers a vast area of the seabed around British Antarctica near the south pole." [6]

Immediately nations far nearer Antarctica and as such with better claims to its territory, Argentina most notably, lodged complaints as "The British claim...conflicts with the spirit of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, to which Britain is a signatory, which prevents all exploitation of oil gas and minerals, other than for scientific research." [7]

Alarms were sounded from other quarters too. Shortly after the British announcement the Chinese People's Daily reported:

"The South Pole, a world of ice and snow, has become a hot spot in recent years. The Argentinean Foreign Ministry stated that vice-Foreign Ministers from Argentina and Chile would be meeting in early December to discuss the South Pole issue, and work out a joint strategy to boycott British sovereign demands on the South Pole's continental shelf." [8]

The same source provided this background information:

"The vastness of seemingly barren, ice-covered land is uncovered and exposed to the outside world, revealing a 'treasure basin' with incredibly abundant mineral deposits and energy reserves....A layer of Permian Period coal exists on the mainland, and holds 500 billion tons in known reserves.

"The thick ice dome over the land is home to the world's largest reservoir for fresh water; holds approximately 29.3 million cubic kilometers of ice;
and makes up 75% of earth's fresh water supply.

"It is possible to say that the South Pole could feed the entire world
with its abundant supplies of food [fish] and fresh water."

And warned that the "the value of the South Pole is not confined to the economic sphere; it also lies in its strategic position.

"The US Coast Guard has long had garrisons in the region, and the US Air Force [is] the number one air power in the region.

"[T]he South Pole [Antarctic] Treaty points out that the South Pole can only be exploited and developed for the sake of peace; and can not be a battle ground. Otherwise, the ice-cold South Pole could prove a fiercely hot battlefield." [9]

Within weeks of the British statement in 2007 Chilean Defense Minister Jose Goni and Air Force Chief of Staff General Ricardo Ortega visited the South Pole "declaring that the use of the Arturo Prat naval base would be formally resumed in March 2008.

"Goni said the resumption of the use of the naval base, along with another two military bases in the Antarctic region, is to demonstrate the presence and sovereignty of Chile...." [10]

* For continued reading: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/message/39469