Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting XXXV

Hobart June 2012

Australian Antarctic Science

Australian Antarctic Division Chief Scientist Dr Nick Gales

We’ve just started a new science strategic plan, the development of that plan was really about ensuring that all of the science that we do in Antarctica was aimed at our national and international priorities and goals and obviously the Antarctic Treaty system is fundamental to that.

We look into two major areas, one of them is ensuring that all of the activities conducted by humans are done so in a way that is sustainable and limits our footprint in Antarctica if you like. So that covers a whole range of things like building stations, cleaning up past pollution, looking at the areas we need to protect from human activities to preserve biodiversity.

The other area is trying to work out the role of Antarctica in global climate, in global weather systems and what might happen into the future. So feeding into those global climate models with important information on how the plateau is changing, how much ice is melting, what’s happening to sea ice and then what’s happening to the biological systems that revolve around all of that physical change. So they’re the two major thrusts of the science.

Within the Treaty system we have the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living resources (CCAMLR) and that has a scientific committee. And that’s really about understanding how much krill there is, how the fisheries are going, ensuring that all of the management practices conducted by the Treaty members in that fishery are done sustainably.

The other part is through the Convention for Environmental Protection, which is another part of the Antarctic treaty system, and that’s where we work on the cleaning up of rubbish tips and then the work around station footprints.

So a large part of the way we are able to do our work is through collaborating with other nations and it is fundamental to us. In comparing notes on what we think are the priority areas of science, working how our logistics can be shared to get our scientists in to the deep field to collect ice-cores or sharing marine resources, like ships to go down and do surveys.

On your own you can do a certain amount, but it you collaborate broadly with the other nations in our area you can do so much more.