Antarctica? OK, sure…

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

I hold a bachelor’s degree in History, and in fact taught it for five years, so it’s something I’ve been into for a while. One of my favorite parts about learning history is the maps. I love to see how historical maps change over time, like when the New World goes from being colonies to being the U.S. to watching westward expansion. Or how the Roman Empire spread over the years and then collapsed.

There have even been major rewrites to the map in my lifetime, like the collapse of the Soviet Union, the reunification of Germany, the division of Czechoslovakia and the renaming of a number of African nations.

My favorite period in history, at least from a maps perspective, is the Age of Empires, when England, Spain, France and a couple of other European powers conquered the world. Yes, it was

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ultimately a terrible thing for the native people in these conquered lands and yes, the building of these empires did lead to the horrific African slave trade, but there’s no denying that the modern world we live in would not exist without all of that exploring and conquest.

You don’t really see a lot of that these days. There are very few places you can just go and plant a flag and say, “I claim this land in the name of…” well, whoever. I mean, I guess, Vladimir Putin is kind of trying to do that right now in Ukraine, but it’s not going well. Like three hours into a game of Monopoly, pretty much all of the real estate has been bought up.

But I guess not ALL of it. Because, you see, way down south there’s the frozen continent of Antarctica. Its very existence was only confirmed just 200 years ago and since then, there have been several treaties put into place to basically keep Antarctica unclaimed, used only for peaceful and scientific research purposes.

Until now, it seems (cue dramatic music…). Antarctica has apparently been claimed… by Iran. Yep… Iran.

If you don’t have a globe handy, I’ll let you know that Antarctice is more than 8,000 miles away from Iran. To be fair, you actually can sail a ship in a straight line directly from the southern coast of Iran to the northern coast of Antarctica. The real question is, why would you?

According to Iran’s leadership, they are planning to use the continent to build a military base at the South Pole and an Naval base along the coast.

Sure, Iran. Sure…

Currently, Iran can not even feed its people thanks to U.S. sanctions put in place due to human rights violations and concerns over its nuclear weapons program. I’m not really to concerned that they’ll be constructing an evil lair on the South Pole any time soon. So, what’s really going on here?

I don’t really know. I read an article in the New York Post about it, but it used big words like “bellicosity” and “brinkmanship” and “intelligencia” so your guess is as good as mine. A bunch of grandstanding, most likely I will say, though, if it works, I’m going up to the North Pole and laying claim to Santa’s Workshop.