9781422279267

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P O L A R P O L I T I C S : E A R T H ’ S N E X T B AT T L E G RO U N D S ?

Nations Convention on the Lawof the Sea (UNCLOS),which took effect in 1992.This convention, or agreement, included traditional laws and new agreements on such things as the right to freely use sea routes or to mine minerals on the seabed . (The United States is the onlyArctic nation that has not agreed to UNCLOS.) The convention gives nations a way to work out disagreements over their claims to resources off their coasts, and so applies to the Arctic as well. Discovering the Last Continent Antarctica’s climate is much harsher than the Arctic’s. Antarctica is the planet’s coldest,driest,andwindiest continent.Winds during blizzards can reach 200miles (321 km) per hour, and in some plac- es the ice is more than one mile (1.6 km) thick. During the winter, ice that forms along its coasts nearly doubles the continent’s size. Unlike the Arctic, no one lived in Antarctica before scientists set up research bases there.At one base, the temperature plunged to –129°F (–89.4°C), the coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth. The continent is surrounded by the SouthernOcean.As in the Arctic, what scientists consider Antarctica extends beyond the circle named for it,which lies at 66 degrees South latitude. In the 1770s, the British explorer James Cook sailed across theAntarctic Circle, though he never spotted the continent itself. He did see huge icebergs, though,which convinced hima large, frozen land- mass was nearby.A littlemore than 40 years later,Russian captain Thaddeus von Bellinghausen was probably the first European