According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctica#Antarctic_territories only 7 countries have staked claims to pieces of the continent, here listed by date of claim from 1908 onwards: the UK, New Zealand, France, Norway, Australia, Chile and Argentina.
I know the US has research bases there (hey, I’ve seen The Thing!) so I don’t quite understand why it wouldn’t claim a chunk for itself. Sure, nobody would be silly enough to try to prevent the US setting up stations but there must be some advantage to laying claims to regions of the continent else why would other countries bother to have done it?
I see that all fresh claims to territory have been suspended since 1959 in a treaty signed by 12 countries including the US but that doesn’t explain why the US wouldn’t have laid a claim prior to that. So why didn’t it?
The US officially reserved the right to claim IIRC, so it’s not out of the question. It’s just that the claim was sort of a free for all that most likely doesn’t mean much nor is there much of a political advantage in the claim over reserving the right to make a claim as it was not really considered habitable, it would be like the US claiming the moon due to the Apollo landings. IIRC only Argentina has any sort of real colonization attempt claim.
Argentina made a deliberate attempt to have citizens born in Antarctica to bolster its claim by sending a pregnant woman there to give birth in 1978. Several other Argentines have since been born there. However, it appears that some Chileans have also been born in Antarctica.
I wonder what the relevant Argentinian laws provide for a child born in Antarctica to Argentine parents. It is automatic Argentinian citizenship, or some form of dual Argentinian and ‘Argentine Antarctica’ citizenship?
Wiki states you merely get the citizenship of your parents, but i don’t take it as conclusive, and Argentina could have a unique legal stance on this.
Wait till we get to Mars, this topic will get really interesting.
All these claims are pretty much rubbish. None will hold up if Antarctica is ever deemed to be valuable and worth populating. If that happens governments will either negotiate a deal at that time or the guy with the most guns takes it.
Marie Byrd Land is mostly “unclaimed”, and is the chunk the US reserves right to claim. Roosevelt instructed Byrd’s expedition to take steps to make a claim in 1939. That expedition and subsequent ones did so, but it was not formalized by the time the 1959 treaty was inked. Some publications actually showed the area as US territory. An 8 degree slice of Marie Byrd land is claimed by New Zealand.
