Antarctica Is Crammed With Abandoned 'Ghost' Stations

[DonViejo]

As wild and empty as the continent might seem, human ambition is changing it permanently.

MARA WILSON AND LEAH FEIGER
MARCH 3, 2021

In almost every sense of the word, the Palmer Archipelago in Antarctica is wild. Humpback whales, elephant seals, and the wandering albatross, a seabird with a wingspan as long as a male great white shark, all call this area home. Towering glaciers and blue-tinged icebergs dot the landscape, and sunsets last for hours.

This empty, untamed place also has a gift shop. Port Lockroy, a small wooden building, was constructed in 1944 as Britain’s first permanent Antarctic base, then abandoned in 1962. Twenty years later, two members of the British Antarctic Survey team visited the deserted station. Penguins were nesting right against the front door—it was “almost like a Narnia moment,” Alan Hemmings, now a professor at the University of Canterbury, in New Zealand, told us. Today, gentoo penguins still roost in the building’s outdoor rafters and peek curiously into the glass windows as tourists browse.

For most of the year, however, the building is uninhabited, like Antarctica itself—the coldest place on Earth (137-degrees-below-Fahrenheit cold), with wind speeds of up to 199 miles an hour. Only 4,000 people, mainly scientific researchers, live in Antarctica during the summer, and about 1,000 in the winter. Seasonal vacationers number in the tens of thousands. For comparison, more than 2 million people call the Sahara Desert home.

But as desolate as Antarctica might seem, humankind’s influence is now shaping the continent, so much so that large swaths of it no longer count as wilderness. Half-operational and deserted stations are scattered around the continent, some still inhabitable, others lost to extreme conditions, and a number left standing to solidify geopolitical claims to land, fishing rights, and minerals. These abandoned buildings, or “ghost” stations, are a physical manifestation of the passion for this harsh land—a drive to both understand and dominate it—that has ultimately begun to destroy it.

Littered across the continent are as many as 5,000 permanent structures—basic huts, lighthouses, churches, and even research stations with rock-climbing walls. In the recent past, before the pandemic, about half of the continent’s 76 active stations would close for the winter. Other stations have been abandoned altogether.

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https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/03/antarctica-running-out-wilderness/618192/