Science’s Polar Legacy: Trail of Trash Heaps All Across Antarctica

Charles Darwin called Antarctica the most natural of continents because it was least influenced by man.

But all that may have go the way of the dodo, thanks to the arrival of gangs of scientists, military men and Earth observers who are bringing to the polar cap their trails of disposables: oil drums, jeeps, portable toilets and piles of waste.

In fact, because of Antarctica’s unique environment, historians can track in detail the turn-of-the-century polar expeditions of Amundsen, Scott and Shackleton. It seems their trail of trash heaps are perfectly preserved in the outdoor icehouse where temperatures often dip 100 degrees below zero and nothing rots away.

Today, trash still accumulates. At the large American scientific post at McMurdo Sound, a 30-year landfill overflows with discarded oil and toxic chemical drums, mountains of food waste and carcasses of cars, boats and helicopters. The bay is polluted by toxic chemical waste and raw sewage pumped directly into the waters. The air is filled with soot from large open-pit burns.

“We don’t think our solutions are perfect or permanent,” said Sidney Draggan, environmental officer for the National Science Foundation, which manages the McMurdo base. “But, for now, they’re the best we have.”

He said domestic sewage is pulverized and mixed with brine before being released, and the main landfill is no longer in use. The site was created by the Navy in the mid-1950s, which parked everything from cars to crates of chemicals on the winter ice shelf in hopes warming weather would take it to sea. The trash, piled year after year, eventually froze into an ice mountain. The National Science Foundation closed the landfill last year and covered it with a layer of rock.

The open burn area, said Draggan, is a temporary way to get rid of combustibles using waste fuel.

“What’s the use of shipping back all that fuel and all that paper and wood?” he asked.

He said closed incinerators simply do not work well in such a perpetually chilly area.

Bruce Manheim, attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund, said the United States is violating an international covenant to rid the landmass of polluting landfills.

“Beyond legalities,” he said, “it seems pretty stupid to burn in the open at a site where scientists are learning about ozone depletion and environmental damage. What hypocrisy.”

The landfill, he said, is known to contain tons of toxic metals and chemicals--many used in scientific experiments deemed too dangerous in the continental United States.

Draggan said the landfill will be removed, but “only when we know what’s in there.” Congress has earmarked $30 million over a five-year period to do just that.

New controls have been established to make sure scientists watch their waste, he said.

According to Guy Guthridge, spokesman for the base, satellite stations must return all waste to McMurdo’s airfield--”the Newark airport of Antarctica”--where it is airlifted to the states.