- How it started
https://archive.ph/mdGXw#selection-833.0-841.45
Tues 22 Feb 2022, 11.40 GMT
Australia will dispatch a fleet of new long-range helicopters, hi-tech drones and long-distance snow vehicles to Antarctica to counter increasing Chinese and Russian expansion across the southern icy continent. The near $1 billion (£530m) strategy is designed to strengthen Australia’s 42 per cent claim over Antarctica’s territory and protect against foreign moves to undermine the Antarctic Treaty signed more than 60 years ago. It comes amid growing concerns about China’s rapidly expanding presence on the continent, despite not being among the dozen countries that originally signed the treaty in 1959.
- How it's going
https://archive.ph/r3qdV#selection-1309.0-1325.101
Thu 5 Oct 2023 02.46 EDT
The Australian Antarctic Division did not have internal budgets and overspent $42m in one year before being forced to cancel or defer dozens of crucial climate science projects, including studies of record-low sea ice. The Greens have described the division’s admission as “shocking” during a Senate inquiry, triggered in part by Guardian Australia’s reports that budget pressure has stopped remediation work and research on melting glaciers, biodiversity and climate change. Several scientists told the inquiry they were frustrated their research had been repeatedly deferred.
Damn, first the NSF's Antartica programs just completely collapsing, huge ice shelf melting, and now Australia doing bullshit shenanigans. Antartica can't catch a break. Will probably be disputed and dysfunctional until global warming makes it productive farm land.
Technically all relevant countries are still paying lip service to the Antarctic Treaty, which prohibits any activities in Antarctica that is not for science (including military, tourism, mining, etc.). The problem both in NSF and AAD is that they are overspending on "science" logistics as a facade to build more
militarylogistics infrastructures, then be like "how could this possibly happen, we're out of money" while cutting the science research they are supposed to support in the first placeWell, there is some stuff that could be used for the military, but in the NSF's case, it is mostly incompetence. They basically demolished a lot of beds and lodging before the replacements were built and then just had a blanket shutdown on the construction of replacements due to COVID and further disruption of the logistics after "COVID over". It really is a much more straight forward example of mismanagement, rather than trying to diverting all the funding to something that could be used for military purposes.