The Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty (Madrid Protocol) mandates the protection of wilderness and aesthetic values in Antarctica. The Madrid Protocol is a protocol to the Antarctic Treaty, so the provisions of the former apply to the area of application of the Treaty, which is "the area south of 60° South Latitude". Between the 60° South line of latitude and the Antarctic continent lies the sea-ice zone, in which sea-ice forms during the winter and decays and mostly melts away during the summer. At its peak the area covered by Antarctic sea-ice is roughly 19 M km2, substantially more than the area of the Antarctic continent (14 M km2), thereby more than doubling the size of Antarctica. The sea-ice zone is critical for maintaining the Antarctic and the Earth's climate and many of the marine ecosystem processes that the Southern Ocean trophic system is dependent upon. It has also been frequently remarked upon as an area of surpassing beauty with many unusual features such as "ice blink", the many types of sea-ice such as frazil ice and pancake ice and the abundant wildlife. The beauty of the sea-ice zone has been remarked on throughout the literature of Antarctic exploration. For example, Edward Wilson, the polar explorer on both of Captain Robert Scott's Antarctic expeditions in the early twentieth century, wrote whilst the Discovery was traversing the pack ice in the Ross Sea: "Strangely beautiful today has been altogether, for all through the pack ice we have not seen the sun. […] It was really very beautiful and may account for the extra abundance of life …" Wilson, Edward Diary of the "Discovery" Expedition to the Antarctic Regions 1901–1904, London: Blandford Press, 1966. In this paper, the wilderness and aesthetic values inherent in the sea-ice zone will be examined, as will the actual and potential threats to these values and what protection may be necessary and can be afforded to a transient, mobile feature that is non-existent for three months of the year.

The Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty (the Madrid Protocol) came into force in 1998 and mandates protection for the wilderness values of Antarctica. Based on the limited data that are publicly available, we made lower bound estimates of the long-term and transient human footprints on terrestrial Antarctica for the period 2016–2018. We found that there has been an 11% increase in the number of research stations and a cumulative three-fold increase in the number of tourist landing sites since 1998. Both long-term and transient human footprints extend across the continent's interior. The pace of implementation of the Madrid Protocol's requirement to protect wilderness values lags far behind that of the expansion of the human footprint. Research on definitions and methods of identifying wilderness has progressed, however, and offers effective tools to aid with Protocol implementation.A review of documents from the website of the Secretariat of the Antarctic Treaty from the last 20 years indicates that Treaty Parties have considered the protection of wilderness values in environmental impact assessments, designation of protected areas, and discussions at Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meetings and meetings of the Committee for Environmental Protection. While there has been progress in providing guidance on wilderness values in non-binding guidelines, Treaty Parties' engagement in the protection of wilderness values remains low.

In a survey of 222 cruise passengers to the Antarctic Peninsula in 2013, nearly 90% of respondents valued Antarctica as one of the world's last great wildernesses. Passengers from Europe and the USA were more likely than those from China to value Antarctica as wilderness. While respondents shared a common perception of wilderness being a place in which human impacts are limited, regional differences were observed. Europeans perceived wilderness as remote, Chinese perceived it as desolate, and Americans valued the psycho-spiritual benefits of being in wilderness. Respondents' wilderness perceptions were nourished by icons of wilderness, mostly from their home countries but also from international destinations. Nearly all respondents agreed that Antarctica should be protected as a wilderness reserve. When asked what human activities should be allowed to take place in an Antarctic wilderness reserve, they supported the protection of Antarctica with no resource extraction and controlled and limited tourism and scientific research. As wilderness or "pure land", Antarctica, with its abundant wildlife, its wildness and its majestic landscapes, inspires awe and desires for its protection from its visitors, potentially playing a crucial role in providing the common experiences and meanings that can bring about a convergence of wilderness perceptions.

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This is the first book whose subject is the music, sounds and silences of Antarctica. From 2011 until 2014, Australia marked its long-standing connection with Antarctica by celebrating the centenary of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition.

Paul Barratt Stephen Bocking Christy Collis Malgosia Fitzmaurice Elena Glasberg Alan D. Hemmings Bernadette Hince Gunhild Hooge Adrian Howkins Valur Ingimundarson Alan Ingram Timo Koivurova Daniela Liggett Cornelia Lüdecke James Manicom Denzil Miller Sami Moisio Joanna Mossop Heather Nicol Liza Piper Greg Poelzer Richard Powell Stuart Prior Leslie Carol Roberts Peder Roberts Juan Francisco Salazar Chris Saunders Karen N. Scott Patrick Shepherd Jeppe Strandsbjerg Rupert Summerson Victoria Tevlina Gary Wilson Oran Young

The Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty, the “Madrid Protocol,” came into force in 1998. Included in its provisions is the protection of wilderness and aesthetic values. Despite the passage of 12 years, implementation of protection of these values has been slow. The history of the desire to protect these values is reviewed, which reveals that they have actually been discussed and promoted by a number of working groups under the auspices of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) since 1980. Protection was included in the failed Convention on the Regulation of Antarctic Mineral Resource Activities (CRAMRA) and before being included in the Madrid Protocol. One of the reasons for the delay in implementation of protection has been the lack of internationally acceptable definitions. The proposition that all Antarctica could be considered as wilderness except for those areas that have been degraded by human activities is consistent with protection measures elsewhere in the world. Aesthetic value encompasses not just scenic beauty but, perhaps more importantly in Antarctica, the sublime. The inclusion of intrinsic value as an additional consideration in the Madrid Protocol is also discussed. To measure the extent of the current impact on wilderness and aesthetic values by human activities, the human footprint in Antarctica needs to be determined. A number of methods of determining the baseline are canvassed, with the least bounding rectangle being favored. Visibility and sound modeling in a geographical information system can then determine the extent of the footprint. A large-scale Internet survey was set up to test a series of hypotheses on definitions of wilderness and aesthetic values, and the impact of human activities on these values and preliminary results are described. The chapter concludes with some proposed implementation measures to achieve better protection for the Antarctic ecosystem.

There has been little progress in implementing protection of wilderness and aesthetic values in Antarctica since the coming into force of the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty in 1998. This can in part be attributed to a lack of research defining these values and showing how they may be assessed. In 2009, a survey comprising 90 images of Antarctic landscapes was established on the Internet to canvass as wide a cross-section of people with an interest in Antarctica as possible on their perceptions of wilderness and their aesthetic preference. At the time of writing, over 337 respondents from 23 nationalities have taken part in the survey. Responses were analysed to determine the effect of human presence, both transient and as infrastructure, on perceptions of wilderness and aesthetic values. The analysis was in three parts: (1) all images combined; (2) images grouped by landscape type, derived from the Environmental Domains of Antarctica regionalization; and (3) 16 pairs of digitally manipulated images of which respondents were shown either an original image or one in which human presence had been either digitally removed or added. Responses to images grouped by landscape type show that coastal and ice-free areas are less valued both aesthetically and as wilderness than mountainous and ice-covered terrains. Signs of human presence were found to make images significantly less likely to be considered as wilderness and also reduced their aesthetic rating. This demonstrates that human impacts on these values are measureable.

Antarctica is designated by the Antarctic Treaty System as a "natural reserve devoted to peace and science" (http://www.ats. aq/index_e.htm). Multiple, and sometimes conflicting, values are protected. In a place where wilderness protection and certain forms of human activity are both prized, a discussion of the protection of the Antarctic wilderness necessarily leads to the question of the present and future human footprint in Antarctica. A comprehensive and systematic assessment of the human footprint in Antarctica has never been done, and in this paper the authors explore the opportunities and challenges in conducting such an assessment. On examining the exchange of information conducted under the Antarctic Treaty System, one finds that the information on human activity in Antarctica is relatively centralized, and that with the right permissions, together with dedicated and significant effort, it should be possible to assemble all information in one place. After that, the next challenge lies in the representation of this data in a coherent manner that would be useful for planning purposes. Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are a useful tool for representing this data; however, much work still needs to be done to arrive at a system that is clear, transparent, and reproducible and can illustrate the impacts of human activities on wilderness character or values.

Protection of the wilderness and aesthetic values of Antarctica is mandated by the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty, the "Madrid Protocol," which came into force in 1998. Despite the passage of over 13 years, systematic protection for these values has not yet been put in place, due, in part, to the absence of suitable definitions for terms such as "aesthetic values." This paper describes a semantic assessment that was part of a large-scale Internet survey on perceptions of wilderness and aesthetic values in Antarctica. The aim of this part of the survey was to provide insights into aesthetic responses beyond simple aesthetic preferences. Respondents were asked to assess the suitability of 20 adjectives for 90 images of Antarctic landscapes. Taking the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime as the starting point, the adjectives were divided into two lists: words associated with the beautiful and words associated with the sublime. Over 315 respondents from 21 countries took part in the survey, resulting in over 33,000 semantic assessments. The landscapes in the images were classified into environmental regions, a modification of the Environmental Domains of Antarctica regionalization. The results reveal amongst other things that responses to coastal ice-free regions differ markedly to all other regions and that human presence has a strong negative effect on semantic assessments. Multidimensional scaling reveals a complex range of semantic responses that provide insights into how people respond to Antarctic landscapes.