Research !! please help!! - Antarctica?

Question

I have a research to do and it is due in 3 days, we only have 3 days to do it. My research is about the Pollution in Antarctica. It has to be presented on a poster.This is what I need to include:

- Main message of the research

- How to prevent pollution in Antarctica

- What humans can do to stop pollution in Antarctica

- How to make it eye-catching

Please help

& Thanks :)

Answer 1

Many tourists are already well informed about environmental issues and know that uncontrolled tourism can damage the features that make the area special. As yet there is no unequivocal scientific evidence of damage but there must be a limit to the number of visitors that sites can sustain before the vegetation or wildlife are trampled out of existence.

There appears to be no legal way at present to do this for visitors to an international area. Governments can help manage tourism by limiting permits to companies with good environmental records, but my view is that the tour companies themselves must accept the responsibility to limit impacts by policing their customers.

Worryingly, the passenger capacity of cruise ships is rising, with ships carrying up to 1,700 passengers proposing to transit the Antarctic whilst others intend to land up to 800 passengers at individual sites. My personal experience of tour ships has so far been good, with guides working hard to inform passengers as well as keep them to a strict environmental code whilst on shore. They do not leave litter, the ships do not deposit waste overboard in Antarctic waters and for the most part visitors do not appear to seriously disturb wildlife.

The Antarctic is special because it has less pollution than anywhere else in the world–it doesn’t have any smokestack industry, agricultural activity or permanent human population. We can use it as the baseline against which pollution levels in other parts of the world can be measured, to tell us whether or not the situation is getting worse. From this point of view, the Antarctic will only remain scientifically valuable if it is properly managed today.

Sampling snow cores in Antarctica has given us a range of pollution yardsticks. We can see in the snow the increasing levels of lead we have been putting into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution, with the most rapid increase when lead was added to fuel for cars. The snow also contains a signature of the worldwide pollution caused by the atomic bomb tests of the 1950s and 1960s. Most recently we have been able to detect carbon particles in the air produced by forest fires in the tropics.

You have to distinguish between global and local threats. Let’s look at the local problems first. Until the mid-1950s there was very little scientific activity in the Antarctic and the only industry in the area was whaling. At that time the oceans were seen as suitable repositories for waste, and dumping waste in uninhabited areas was acceptable. When I first began work in the Antarctic in 1967, recycling was not even considered in many research stations and dumping waste in remote areas of the Antarctic was a common practice. Unfortunately, in the low temperatures characteristic of the Antarctic, there is virtually no bacterial decay, so the wastes associated with scientific stations and with this laissez-faire attitude of earlier days are still with us. In fact it was this problem of waste disposal that raised the alarm among AT countries and led to the signature in 1991 of the Protocol for the Protection of the Antarctic Environment. This protocol, which came into legal force in January 1998 but had been followed by most countries since 1991, introduced rigorous environmental regulations and forced countries to clean up the mess they had created.

The rules comprise the most stringent conservation and management rules so far agreed upon anywhere in the world. They cover all human activities in Antarctica, and include stipulations for rigorous control of waste disposal and contingency plans to combat marine pollution and protect flora and fauna. No mining or exploration for minerals or hydrocarbons will be allowed in the Antarctic for the next 50 years. The AT nations have taken their role as managers very seriously and made enormous amounts of investment in changes of practice. It costs a lot of money to be environmentally clean. When the U.S. agreed to the protocol they immediately produced $30 million for clean-up operations around the American scientific stations

In other words, the Antarctic Treaty and the Protocol to prevent pollution are functioning well within the Antarctic itself but pollution is coming in from outside.

That’s right. Most of the Antarctic pollutants come from industrial and agricultural activity in the northern hemisphere. We can measure them in the air, the snow and in the plants and animals. For example, there is one especially unpleasant group of chemicals called persistent organic pollutants (POPs) which comprises insecticides, herbicides and other environmentally damaging substances. These compounds do not exist naturally, break down only very slowly in marine and terrestrial ecosystems and accumulate with toxic effects. None of them are made or used in the Antarctic and they are now banned from use both there and in many other parts of the world. They mainly originate from the northern hemisphere, produced by agriculture, industrial processes and from waste breakdown. Measuring their presence in Antarctic penguins and seals indicates the baseline pollution level for these compounds throughout the world. The increasing range and concentration of many POPs in Antarctica is a sobering reminder of how far these damaging compounds can spread outside our control and how little we can do about it.

Industrial countries of the North contribute up to 80 per cent of the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming and endanger fragile areas like the Antarctic. Yet these countries are also parties to the environmental protocol to preserve the Antarctic environment. That is quite correct. It is surprising, to say the least, that states which have shown extraordinary co-operation in preserving the Antarctic environment are not doing enough to control the pollution in their own parts of the world.

The Antarctic Treaty is a bit like the International Law of the Sea, where everybody agrees on what should happen on the high seas and then does something different in their own waters. There seems to be a contrast between what countries can do co-operatively in an area that is not owned by them and is not being industrially developed by them and has no indigenous population, and what they do in their own territory where there is a population, industry and expectations for a different way of life.

Nothing can be done to prevent this long-range pollution in the Antarctic which is due to industrial activities in other parts of the world. Antarctic pollution will continue as long as pollution continues elsewhere in the world. What we can do is to attempt to keep our own Antarctic house in order by ensuring that the activities that take place down there are first of all subject to environmental impact assessment and then that we use technologies and methodologies that minimize damage or pollution.

One major reason why the AT nations have been able to introduce such stringent environmental regulations is that there is no indigenous population seeking to fulfil its aspirations at the cost of the environment. In the Arctic region on the other hand, where there is a sizeable population and countries have sovereign territory, there are very considerable areas of mineral development and hydrocarbon and gas extraction. In Siberia, for example, there are enormous oil spills from fractured pipelines and heavy metal pollution problems from smelters that simply do not occur in the Antarctic.

Environmentalists say the Treaty is not clear about this.

That is true. No agreement has been reached as yet. This question is on the agenda for the treaty meeting in Lima in May.

There are a number of difficult problems. First of all you have to get 27 countries with 27 different legal systems and 27 different cultural expectations to agree on what liability means.

Take, for example, the idea of a protected area in a national park. In the U.S., a national park is a protected area owned by the Federal government and is run as a park for conservation purposes. A national park in the UK is not owned by the government but by lots of separate land-owners. It isn’t run mainly for conservation purposes. It contains industry, housing and all sorts of other activities. It doesn’t bear any resemblance whatsoever to the American, German and French versions. The same term in law means lots of different things in different countries. That is one of the major problems we face in the case of liability.

The Antarctic treaty freezes all territorial claims that were there in 1961 and these cannot be improved on or added to in any way. Taking away this major source of international disagreement has allowed the parties to continually adjust the treaty to meet changing public and political needs over the past 38 years. Of particular importance throughout that period has been the scientific advice on the best methods for management that has been supplied by the international science community. That makes the AT a slightly unusual treaty. By including scientists right from the start it has been able to tap into the scientific community and get sound scientific advice.

The special environmental characteristics of the continent make it possible to carry out scientific investigations and experiments which are not possible anywhere else in the world. We are looking at animals and plants that can survive in the very low temperatures and very dry atmosphere which are characteristic of the Antarctic. We are using the Antarctic as an experimental area to test out theories about whether life can survive on Mars. And we are managing one of the largest fisheries in the southern hemisphere.

Because of the characteristics of the earth’s magnetic field, the Antarctic has some unique features enabling us to investigate the causes of solar storms. These occur when a solar flare on the sun produces a storm of charged particles which hurtle towards the earth