Conclusions

Throughout human history, nations and empires have colonized territories across the Earth and claimed jurisdiction over these areas, resulting too often in conflicts. To end the battles and wars, protagonists have signed treaties, such as the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which solidified the concept of the nationstate, blending cultural and political authority within geographic boundaries. Curiously, just a few years before, in 1609, the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius published Mare Liberum, a treatise articulating freedoms of the sea existing beyond the jurisdiction of nations (Bull et al., 1990). Together, these legal paradigms developed in the seventeenth century reveal a global governance dichotomy that is with us still and that features national spaces governed by states acting on the basis of national interests juxtaposed to international spaces in which all nations have common interests. Three centuries later, Antarctica was no different than other areas on Earth where nationstates assert their sovereign jurisdiction (Lüdecke, this volume). Like a pie, the division of Antarctica started with the letters patent from the United Kingdom in 1907 and continued with additional claims by New Zealand, France, Australia, Norway, Argentina, and Chile by 1943. With the aidememoire and draft agreement that the United States transmitted in secret to the seven claimant nations in 1948, Antarctica was positioned to become just another domino in the history of territorial expansion. This nationstate trajectory in Antarctica shifted course dramatically with the emergence of the vision underlying a Third International Polar Year (renamed the International Geophysical Year) and the statesmanship of President Eisenhower of the United States in the early 1950s (Berkman, this volume). The International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957–1958 provided a coordinated international avenue for synoptic studies of the Earth as an interconnected geophysical system combining land, air, and water with forcing from the Sun. This was followed by the International Biological Program (1964–1974), an attempt to apply the big science approach to ecosystem functioning and productivity at a global scale (Worthington, 1975). Biological dynamics of the Earth as an interconnected system, as illustrated by the Gaia hypothesis (Lovelock and Margulis, Conclusions