The oil still gushes from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, and washes up on shores, destroying and threatening tourism, fishing, and ecology. The Coast Guard and BP work tirelessly to plug the leak and limit the damage. The U.S. District Court of New Orleans just overturned an Obama administration moratorium on new drilling, citing that this rig’s disaster does not necessarily presage others’. Sometimes it looks like the President is more concerned with punishing big oil than fixing the problem.

If the United States did ban offshore drilling, where would we get the lost oil? These are considerations that the government will hopefully make. In fact, which forms of energy we should develop, where we should develop them, and how we should develop them seem to be the greatest challenge facing mankind in the 21st century. The answers are debatable, but there is one consideration that is not conventionally thrown around. Antarctica.

Remember Antarctica? The seventh continent; the only place left on earth without real political domain; the only place on earth without indigenous people or permanent residents. Sometimes we forget about the ol’ girl. The ozone thing was big in the late ’80s. And who hasn’t done a middle school book report on Antarctica in order to get out of doing one on a real country? But now-a-days, Antarctica is flying under the radar.

Antarctica is 5.4 million square miles, is a little larger than Europe, and has unknown potentials for oil, coal, and other resources. The reasons why we haven’t tapped Antarctica’s resources have a lot to do with harsh polar conditions, floating icebergs, a mile-thick layer of terrestrial ice, and the high cost of dealing with any one of the three. But they also have to do with the Antarctica Treaty System, signed in 1959 and revised in 1991, which prohibits military activity or resource mining until 2048.

The Antarctic Treaty System, which weakly addresses political claims to the continent, works in large part because no one really needs Antarctica for anything else but scientific research. Today there is no real effort to exploit, or fear of exploiting, Antarctic resources because much cheaper global oil reserves are likely to last at least 30 more years. By that time, we hope that the demand for oil and other resources might subside due to advances in technology.

Nevertheless, at some point in time, technology will expose Antarctica rather than protect it. Science fiction, and even theoretical science, romanticizes a colonization of Mars at a time when inhabitation on Earth becomes unsustainable. However, forming colonies in Antarctica is much more foreseeable. In fact, the McMurdo polar station in Antarctica can support over 1,000 residents today, and runs much like a city. What if something like abnormal solar activity, radio activity, or a pandemic made life impossible near the equator or in the northern hemisphere? Antarctica could become a refuge. And the Antarctic Treaty would not hold up under the pressure.

There are seven countries that make informal political claims to 7 of Antarctica’s 8 territories. Australia has the largest claim, which covers most of the eastern hemisphere side of the continent. There are a handful of other countries, Russia and the U.S. included, that have reserved a right to claim parts of Antarctica in the future. In a purely theoretical geopolitical sense, Antarctica is a world war waiting to happen. Practically however, Antarctica is too fruitless at the moment to fight for. Maybe the need to mine or inhabit Antarctica will happen slowly and seamlessly enough as to avoid conflict. But one thing is for sure — technology will eventually diminish the costs of being there. And when that happens, people will be there. And where there are people there are nations. Maybe it is not so crazy to think that in a hundred years there will be an Antarctic War for Independence. Let me be the first on record to suggest a name for this future nation: the Penguin Republic of Antarctica. Better known as “the good old PR of A.”

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