“Antarctica shall be used for peaceful purposes only. There shall be prohibited, inter alia, any measure of a military nature, such as the establishment of military bases and fortifications, the carrying out of military manoeuvres, as well as the testing of any type of weapon. The present Treaty shall not prevent the use of military personnel or equipment for scientific research or for any other peaceful purpose.”
– Article I of the Antarctic Treaty (1 December 1959)
The earliest Antarctic explorers, the first sighting of Antarctica, and the first landing there
As early as antiquity itself, it was postulated that there was a vast continent (then called “Terra Australis”) in the far south of the globe. It was actually in the second century AD that Marinus of Tyre coined the term “Antarctic,” which basically means “opposite of the Arctic Circle.” As Wikipedia puts it, “The rounding of the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn in the 15th and 16th centuries proved that Terra Australis Incognita (‘Unknown Southern Land’), if it existed, was a continent in its own right. In 1773, James Cook and his crew crossed the Antarctic Circle for the first time. Although he discovered new islands, he did not sight the continent itself. It is believed that he came as close as 240 km (150 mi) from the mainland.” (Source: Their page on the “History of Antarctica”) In January 1820, there was a Russian expedition, which was led by Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Mikhail Lazarev. Due to the number of birds flying there, he believed that land must be close. But it was not until ten months later that the continent itself was finally sighted. On 17 November 1820, an American sealer named Nathaniel Palmer became the first to sight Antarctica. It may have been over a year later that an English-born American captain named John Davis, another sealer, set foot on the ice. It was the first landing on the continent of Antarctica.
Russian admiral Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen, who led an early expedition in the region
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