Cold rush: Trump could withdraw from celebrated treaty in order to claim and mine Antarctica

The Antarctic Treaty has kept the southernmost continent free of weapons, borders and mines for more than 65 years. But with US President Donald Trump’s record of pulling out of global agreements, even Antarctica may not be immune to mineral resource politics. 

Could the US exit the treaty to pursue oil and gas? It’s no longer a fringe question. When 29 Antarctic decision-making states meet in Milan this June, it may be time to consider a back-up plan. 

The 1959 disarmament agreement, which bans military activity and mining south of 60°S, has made Antarctica a rare zone of peace and staggering scientific output. But that peace could be thinning like an ice sheet. Professor Donald Rothwell, a leading expert on polar law, has warned that Trump’s unpredictable approach could put the treaty at risk. 

In a detailed analysis on the strained state of treaty law and its implications for Australia, Rothwell suggests Trump may seek to assert a territorial claim and exploit East Antarctica’s potential 500 billion barrels of oil and gas — a figure often cited by Moscow.

“American interests in staking a territorial claim or being able to engage in Antarctic mining could be a driver for abandonment of the Antarctic Treaty,” says Rothwell, an academic at the Australian National University. “Australia would need to have a clearly developed diplomatic and legal strategy to respond to any such American challenge...”

Trump has already shown his cards: cutting $60-million from South Pole station funding, opening the international seabed to mining and exiting the Paris climate accord — twice. 

Even the 1991 Madrid Protocol, which outlawed Antarctic mining indefinitely, was crafted with a built-in escape hatch. To protect future “rights” to exploit resources, it was none other than the US’s protocol architects who insisted on a withdrawal clause from January 2048. 

The chilling plausibility of a US exit strategy

As any worried penguin might tell you, Antarctica is often described as too remote and cold for mining by diplomats who just hope and bray everything will be okay. 

Already swarming in tens of thousands of human tourists every year, the fast-warming Antarctic Peninsula is three times closer to South America’s port of Puerto Williams than Portland harbour is to Donald Trump’s present imperial obsession — Greenland. 

To launch its Antarctic getaway today, the US could propose changes at an annual meeting — such as the one coming up in Milan from 23 June. It — and any of the other 29 treaty states — could also call a review conference. 

If those changes are approved but not ratified, Trump and friends could legally waltz out of the treaty within two years.

Map showing the territorial claims to Antarctica. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

Geopolitical pie

The treaty’s territorial law has its place, and yet it is not unlike the leopard seal guarding the penguin rookery. Staked by Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, New Zealand, Norway and the UK, each Antarctic territorial claim is preposterously big. 

Seen as a slice of ice in a giant, carved-up pie, Canberra’s wedge would eclipse Greenland almost three times over. 

The overlapping slice counterclaimed by Argentina, Chile and the UK is, understandably, one of the most contested territorial powder kegs on the planet. It is also about three times larger than Greenland.

But the treaty is the only existing legal dam holding back a new colonial land grab. Although the US and Russia reserve the right to claim all or parts of Antarctica, no one can enforce their claims or stake new claims as long as the non-expiring pact remains in force.

No one has ever been mad enough to do so. But defying the treaty, or leaving it, could unleash a scramble for land and resources not seen since the most recent colonial era of territorial expansion.

Southern Africa, Europe, the US, Australia and New Zealand compared with Antarctica. (Image: Courtesy Professor Ian Meiklejohn, Rhodes University Geography Department)

Territorial test run

Today, exactly a year ago, Daily Maverick exposed Russia’s six annual oil and gas seismic surveys in the West Antarctic’s Weddell Sea sector, which is counterclaimed by Argentina, Chile and the UK. 

Read more: Breaking news exclusive | UK ministers face a grilling as Russian ship heads back from Antarctic ‘prospecting’ push

We revealed this explosive investigation three months after a Westminster committee of inquiry had heard expert testimony citing the findings from our 50-article series — that Moscow may have used legal scientific research as a fig-leaf for “prospecting” activities in the Southern Ocean.

Just weeks before, in February, the Biden administration had imposed energy sanctions on Moscow’s picaresque Antarctic survey ship, the Akademik Alexander Karpinsky. This made Washington — the treaty depositary — the first state to acknowledge that the Karpinsky was doing more than scientific research in the ban-protected Antarctic.  

In response to the Westminster inquiry and our revelations about Russia’s seismic surveys, news outlets in Argentina, Chile and the UK exploded with populist headlines on 11 May — just as world powers were preparing to gather for the treaty’s 10-day annual talks in Kochi, India, from 20 May.

Vowing to defend Chile’s claim, President Gabriel Boric issued two threats to Moscow to back off from any designs to exploit the Weddell Sea’s potential minerals and hydrocarbons, on 16 May and again on 24 May. 

Chile ha defendido, defiende y defenderá que la Antártica es un continente de ciencia y de paz. Nos opondremos firmemente a cualquier explotación comercial de minerales e hidrocarburos y trabajaremos en conjunto con todos los países reclamantes y los firmantes del Tratado… https://t.co/9owxOL9pal

— Gabriel Boric Font (@GabrielBoric) May 16, 2024

Respecto de la Antártica, el Estado de Chile tiene una sola posición: La Antártica es y será un continente de ciencia y de paz.

Nos opondremos firmemente a cualquier intento de explotación minera y de hidrocarburos y velaremos por cuidar íntegramente este laboratorio natural. https://t.co/3foRdNrP05

— Gabriel Boric Font (@GabrielBoric) May 24, 2024

Meanwhile, Defence Minister Maya Fernández and the rest of Chile’s top security brass flew to the Antarctic Peninsula “in an act of sovereignty”.

Read more: Antarctic diplomatic spat spurs renewed push for unambiguous mining ban

Amid the media furore, Boric announced he would visit the South Pole himself — a statement that also followed unconfirmed rumours about President Javier Milei’s desire to launch a joint naval base with the US to shore up Argentina’s Antarctic claim. 

Born in the Antarctic gateway of Punta Arenas, Boric — the Antarctican president — fulfilled his promise less than a year later in January 2025. His South Pole visit also triggered global media coverage.

Power and propaganda: UK media, China and Russia stoke Antarctic ambition

Since learning of Russia’s oil and gas sorties, The Telegraph has published a series of articles steeped in neocolonial, populist propaganda: from a travel guide on “How to see the most remote [sic] corners of British Antarctica before everyone else”, to a report urging London to launch a “glorious British repurposing of the Antarctic wasteland ... before Argentina”.

Habitually blocking Antarctic conservation plans supported by all other states, China and Russia now also seem ready to capitalise on a likely leadership vacuum left by American withdrawal from the South Pole. 

The day after Trump announced his cuts, including funds for supplying fresh water to the South Pole station, Russia declared it would build brand-new facilities and revive old ones in the Antarctic’s only so-called unclaimed sector, a story first reported by Daily Maverick. Weeks earlier, China had announced plans to build its sixth base here. 

Read more: Breaking news exclusive | Trump’s $60m Antarctic infrastructure cut is a blow to US influence at the South Pole

In Antarctica, scientific presence equals power and launching stations in this understudied, unclaimed sector is not only a geopolitical statement but offers the chance to further study two notoriously vulnerable local glaciers: Pine Island and Thwaites. Known as Marie Byrd Land, this pie slice of at least 1.5 million km2 represents the largest unclaimed territory on Earth.

Both China and Russia had unveiled new scientific research stations in other parts of Antarctica in 2024. Russia’s flagship East Antarctic Vostok outpost is part-funded by gas oligarch Leonid Mikhelson. 

‘As welcome as a skunk at a picnic’

The upcoming annual meeting in Milan, from 23 June to 3 July, may not be a final verdict on the treaty’s future.

The wheels of treaty governance move at such a glacial pace one might ask if it’s the continent’s relative remoteness rather than any level of verifiable political will that has maintained Antarctica as Earth’s last unmined frontier.

Daily Maverick is reliably informed that the 2024 meeting in Kochi was buzzing with corridor talk about Russia’s oil and gas overtures. The issue, however, did not make it into the plenary hall because it was not on the agenda.

Read more: Breaking news exclusive | ‘Gentleman’s agreement’: Despite mining ban, Russia scours Antarctica for massive fossil fuel deposits

Indeed, apart from Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, openly talking about anything that may rock the icebreaker is generally frowned upon in the deferential world of the meeting’s realpolitik.

At a Washington, DC, policy conference in September 2023, National Security Council and State Department officials were quizzed about the potential implications of a “future” US president making a Greenland-style play for Antarctica. The question was posed by former US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte, the panel moderator. 

“Such a question was as welcome as a skunk at a picnic,” observes William Muntean, Biden’s former Antarctic policy head, in his new analysis on a century of US Antarctic policy. 

Leaving a beneficial treaty to excavate Antarctica would make no sense, argues the former diplomat, who led the 2023 project that convinced treaty states to recommit themselves, on paper at least, to the mining ban. The US has shown no interest in being a formal Antarctic claimant, says Muntean. Heavily invested in building a competitive ice-breaking fleet, Trump’s administration “would want to be certain that the area it claims has sufficient benefit” to outweigh the political, scientific, environmental and logistical costs. 

Those costs could include a “loss of goodwill and trust” — principles that Trump does not seem particularly worried about.

It is also unclear, Muntean adds, how the US would now charge a type of “rent” to state actors already operating in Antarctica. 

Pretoria to the empire enthusiasts: Captain Snowpants can keep his flag

Boric’s top Antarctic legislator, the University of Chile professor Luis Valentín Ferrada Walker, last month made his own thoughts clear on the institution’s blog. 

“Chile exercises sovereignty over Antarctica. Chile wakes up in the morning and says, ‘The Chilean Antarctic territory is an integral and essential part of my territory.’ So, the first thing Chile does is exercise presence and control in that sector.”

Muntean also considers that US Antarctic logistics rely on other claimants — and any potential sovereignty claim by the Trump administration would require an appetite to square off with Argentina, Australia and New Zealand.

South Africa is the only Antarctic port that lacks such complications, Muntean points out, but is right that Pretoria’s 2021 Antarctic policy gives colonial-era land grabbers the cold shoulder.

Read more: The Empire strikes ice — UK broadsheet calls for oil grab in ‘Antarctic wasteland’

But what if the Trump administration did turn its back on textbook common sense (again)? The National Security Council’s strategic communications division did not respond to requests for comment.

Antarctica’s army of mid-weight career diplomats — described by governance expert Professor Alan Hemmings as a “merely performative minimalist management system” — had better ask the higher-ups how they could be allowed to toe the line. DM

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