Antarctica's Territorial Claims and the Antarctic Treaty

Antarctica was first sighted in 1820, most likely by the Russian expedition of Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Mikhail Lazarev aboard the Vostok and Mirny, though the British naval officer Edward Bransfield and the American sealer Nathaniel Palmer made close, roughly contemporaneous sightings the same year, leaving the precise priority disputed among historians of exploration. Sustained interior exploration came nearly a century later: Roald Amundsen's Norwegian party reached the South Pole on 14 December 1911, five weeks ahead of Robert Falcon Scott's British expedition, whose five members died on the return journey in 1912. On the strength of such expeditions and of whaling and sealing activity, seven states advanced formal territorial claims over sectors of the continent during the first half of the twentieth century: the United Kingdom (from 1908, later organized as the British Antarctic Territory), New Zealand (the Ross Dependency, 1923), France (Adélie Land, 1924), Norway (Peter I Island, 1929, and Queen Maud Land, 1939), Australia (the Australian Antarctic Territory, 1933), Chile (1940), and Argentina (1943). Because the British, Chilean, and Argentine claims all converge on the Antarctic Peninsula sector, they physically overlap one another, a legacy tangled further with the long-running Falklands/Malvinas dispute between Britain and Argentina.