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Antarctica’s dilemma — how to govern a continent that won’t stay still

Lesai Seema
By Lesai Seema
26 Mar 2025
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At the heart of the discussion on Antarctic governance is a critical question: how do we design a system that adapts in real-time to emerging crises, rather than one that is reactive and must constantly be rebuilt?

In my last column, I wrote about whether Antarctica should be granted legal personhood. Whether, in a world that only listens to those with (legal) standing, giving the continent a voice might be the way to save it. 

But personhood is not an end in itself; it is a possible mechanism, a prosthetic limb attached to something much bigger. The real question is not about status but about structure. In other words, the structure of Antarctic governance (currently the Antarctic Treaty regime) – and how it can be structured in such a way that it does not ossify into a form incapable of responding to the realities it seeks to govern.

To understand why the structure of governance must evolve, we must first recognise that even the best-designed systems can collapse. Here the Tacoma Narrows Bridge is instructive. 

In 1940, engineers stood before the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, a triumph of modern engineering designed through the rigorous application of known physics. However, when wind came, it moved, not with the rigid defiance of steel, but like a ribbon caught in a draft. At first, this seemed to be an anomaly within acceptable tolerances, a curiosity. Then, one morning, the bridge began to twist, the roadway buckled and within hours the entire bridge collapsed into the water below.

The engineers understood physics. They had used well-established equations to design the bridge, carefully calculating load bearing, wind resistance and structural integrity. But what they had not accounted for was a new emergent understanding: aerodynamic resonance. In certain conditions, wind-induced oscillations amplify rather than dissipate. If the wind is too slow, the effect does not build up. If the wind is too fast, the oscillations cancel out. But under the right conditions, the bridge becomes a self-sustaining oscillation system, like a musical instrument vibrating at its resonant frequency. 

This, as it turns out, is how collapse often works: a series of forces mistaken for anomalies, dismissed as statistical noise, until the moment they become undeniable. Until the moment someone finally says: 

“Oh.”

Now, replace that bridge with Antarctica. 

The governance of an unfinished continent


It cannot be overstated that establishing the Antarctic Treaty in 1959, in the shadow of the Cold War, was a geopolitical triumph. The treaty did exactly what it was designed to do: freeze territorial claims, prevent mining and military installations and create a framework for scientific cooperation. 

Governance begins like this. You build the best structure possible with the knowledge available, adapted to its immediate purpose. Then you listen, watch and work off the resonance.

By the 1960s commercial sealing had expanded beyond sustainable limits, threatening Antarctic ecosystems. The response? The Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Seals (CCAS). A reinforcement. A correction.

By the 1970s, another shock: unregulated krill and finfish harvesting. The treaty, designed for scientific research and territorial governance, had no mechanism for managing marine ecosystems. The CCAS had dealt with seals but left the rest unprotected. So, in 1980, the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources was introduced, shifting the Antarctic Treaty System to an ecosystem-based approach.

By 1991 it had become clear that the continent needed more than just resource management. The Protocol on Environmental Protection was signed, banning mining and strengthening environmental safeguards. Then came additional annexes, measures, refinements. You get the point. It is never finished. 

Each of these steps followed the same pattern: identify a destabilising force, legislate against it, reinforce the system. This is functional governance. But it is also reactive governance, a process that assumes Antarctica itself is a static entity, that the only variable needing control is human activity within the treaty-defined area.

This assumption is no longer viable. Antarctica is governing itself. 

Scientists already know this. They do not model Antarctica’s behaviour through the static logic of regulation. 

They use partial differential, or Navier-Stokes, equations for fluid motion. Coincidentally – and without making this about the equations themselves – the Navier-Stokes equations remain unsolved in their general form. No one has yet proven whether they always yield smooth solutions. And yet, we use them because they are our best available understanding of the forces at play.

Read more: Deeply distasteful — sex cruises to Antarctica set to hasten degradation of Earth’s last great wilderness

Read more: Fact Check: No, SA’s Antarctic research station isn’t a ‘giant tree stump from before the Flood’

This is instructive. It tells us something about governance. What kind of system do you need when knowledge of a crisis and its remedy emerge in real-time? Ideally, one that adapts rather than one that must be dismantled and rebuilt with every discovery.

Ideally, if an Andrew Wiles-like figure solved the Navier-Stokes problem tomorrow, in that world, they should be able to walk into a decision-maker’s office, lay out the equations that describe an imminent tipping point and say:

“Here is exactly what is happening. These are the corrective steps available.”

And those steps should be implementable without dismantling the entire governance structure.

The real destabilising force is not human presence in Antarctica, it is the governance gap/lag that treats Antarctica as a political space, rather than a physical system within a planetary network. DM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REeWvTRUpMk


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