Why is Antarctic research so important?
The Antarctic offers an environment clean of most modern pollutants – there is no industry, and very few human inhabitants to pollute the continent. It’s very fragile ecology is a barometer of the effect mankind is having on earth’s ecosphere – take for instance the research that led to the realisation that CFCs were destroying our ozone layer. The eons old ice layers of the continent also yield valuable clues as to what possibly happened during the earth’s distant past (e.g. the concentration of certain oxygen atoms in the ice tells us how warm the earth was at that stage). Lately the ice also gives us an indication of the pollution we’re pumping into the atmosphere. Marine research around the continent yields information regarding the health of our oceans, and are also used as thermometers to measure possible increases in the earth’s global temperature. Antarctic geology also tells us a lot about the earth’s geological past, about when all the continents were joined as one big land m
