It's 20 years since Australian prime minister Bob Hawke led a global campaign to overthrow international plans to manage Antarctic mineral exploitation. The Madrid protocol to the Antarctic Treaty is seen as a global benchmark for ecosystem management, imposing rules so strict that, for example, all huskies had to leave the continent. The protocol is explicit about minerals. It forbids "any activity relating to mineral resources, other than scientific research". This ban can't be revisited until at least 2048 — or 50 years after the protocol came into force. But the over-arching Antarctic Treaty is also a diplomatic two-step. Australia claims 42 per cent of the continent, including a 5000-kilometre coastline and a vast offshore Exclusive Economic Zone. Yet under the treaty, all territorial claims are frozen.

Countries such as the former Soviet Union, and now China and India, have not sought permission from Canberra to build their bases in the Australian Antarctic Territory. This makes the minerals ban a vital dampener on the enthusiasm of great powers, past and future. Russia discovered this when it announced in May 2001 that a government prospecting ship had collected data on gas and oil reserves in Antarctica. When it released a paper at the next Antarctic Treaty meeting outlining work on the "enormous" mineral potential of Antarctica, it ruffled penguin feathers mightily. At the time some diplomats excused their Russian colleagues by saying the impoverished Russian Antarctic program was only trying to make itself relevant to Moscow.

Nevetherless a blustering Russian paper to the 2002 treaty meeting concluded: "The Russian geological scientific programs . . . must not be mistaken for mineral exploitation." Likewise when South Korea, new on the scene, talked about exploiting Antarctic minerals, it too was slapped down. China's interest in Antarctica has developed rapidly in the past decade. Two of its three bases are in the Australian Antarctic Territory, and there is a record of growing co-operation on scientific research. Beijing also has an eye on the vast protein bank of Antarctic krill, this summer beginning a five-year marine survey project using two ships. So it was no great surprise that a senior Chinese delegation should use Australia's airlink to fly into Antarctica last week.

What was more important was the discovery by Fairfax journalist Jo Chandler, who was at Casey, and saw the delegation. She reported that the Chinese were led by the Minister for Land and Resources, Xu Shaoshi. He declined to speak Chandler, but the director of China's polar programs, Qu Tanzhou, told her: "Also, we are here about the potential of the resources and how to use these resources." The failure of the Copenhagen climate talks in December has been seen in retrospect as the doing of an intransigent China, marking a watershed in the balance of global power. You might expect Antarctic Treaty nations would take on Beijing over minerals with the same vigour they showed in forcing a backdown from Moscow and Seoul. But don't hold your breath.

Andrew Darby is and Tasmania correspondent.