Power and Ice: The Struggle for Antartica (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798184706726)

This is a book about the one place on Earth that the great powers once agreed to leave alone, and about why that agreement is now under strain. For more than sixty years,

Antarctica has been the rarest of things in international affairs: a continent governed not by conquest or commerce but by a treaty that set sovereignty aside and reserved an entire landmass for science and peace. That arrangement was held through the Cold War, through the unipolar decades that followed, and through the early tremors of a new era of rivalry. It is one of the most successful pieces of international cooperation ever devised.

Success, however, breeds complacency, and complacency is dangerous. The forces that made the Antarctic settlement possible - a balance of power, a shared sense that the continent's resources were too remote to fight over, a willingness among rivals to subordinate ambition to a common rule - are not permanent.

Climate change is making the unreachable reachable. New technology is making the unaffordable affordable. And the return of open competition among the United States, China, and Russia is reaching even the bottom of the world. The question this book asks is not whether Antarctica will descend into conflict tomorrow; it almost certainly will not.

The question is whether the patient, unglamorous work of cooperation can outlast the pressures now building against it.


Author: Richard Murch
ISBN-13: 9798184706726
Publisher: Independently Published
Language: English
Published: 06/28/2026
Pages: 136
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.38lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.34d