During the coming climate crisis, you’d do well to pitch a tent somewhere in Antarctica. Not too close to the coast, of course, near the ebbing colonies of Adelie penguins, nor on an ice shelf breaking up and shuddering into the rising sea. Even the Ross Ice Shelf, a floating mass the size of Texas and up to a kilometer thick, may with a few more degrees of warming crumble and go. So you’d want to move inland, or “in-ice,” as it were (exposed land scarcely exists), to a stable ice cap. Where to look? Your choice is no choice at all: West Antarctica or East Antarctica. The West, from which most of the news about potential catastrophic disintegration emerges, is also about a kilometer thick but underpinned by bedrock and sediments that are mostly below sea level. Rising seas could turn much of the West into a diminishing archipelago of icebergs. To be safe, your new home should be in the East.

Life in East Antarctica takes some getting used to. You sit lonely on a vast, nearly sterile expanse of wind-blown snow, which below you is compacting under its own weight into ice one to three miles deep. Years are divided between brutal summer and impossible winter. (Earth’s coldest temperature, a frightening –128.6° F, was recorded here one winter.) The East’s scale and monotony outstretch the imagination. Topographic maps fail at the edges of its oceanic surface, at what is called “the limit of observation.” Its entire biology is in its visitors: microbes brought in on far-ranging winds and humans brought in by aircraft or ski. Your arrival would bring far more complexity than you would find. You have to bring everything you need; the East Antarctic ice cap provides nothing but cold air and frozen water. It helps to have a government agency supplying insulated clothing, packaged (frozen) food, artificial shelter, boundless fuel, and transport, i.e. the trappings of industrial life that staggered the planet and sent you fleeing to the ice in the first place. But leaving aside the difficulties of survival amid the polar harshness, there is a more interesting question: how would you cope with a world made merely of ice, sky, and time?

I worked in the United States Antarctic Program (USAP) from 1994 to 2004—as a Waste Management Technician, Fuels Operator, Cargo Handler, Skiway Groomer, and finally a Camp Supervisor in remote spaces—and fell in love with the icescape. Part of me is still milling about on the ice cap. I’ve spent my years since leaving trying to be Melville’s guy, the one telling about the self amid his “heartless immensity.” It’s a poetic act, to be sure, one that on occasion says more about my aesthetics than about Antarctica, but those ice-contemplating years taught me a lot about both.

Melville instructs: “Mark, how when sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea—mark how closely they hug their ship and only coast along her sides.” In my East Antarctic summers, when I wandered out from a cluster of tents, I had only myself to observe. There was nothing—literally no thing—else. My senses felt both overwhelmed and starved. The perfect blue press of sky that settled down to the circular horizon, ringing the great white desert, muffled sound and thought. With my tents a few miles away reduced to fine print on the horizon, I could turn in one of two directions: backward or inward. Usually I did both, retreating to a tent and my notebook. The surrounding emptiness had a story to tell, I was sure, but inevitably the ice merely reflected back my own story, and like Melville’s sailors, I was unlikely to stray far from Point A when there was no Point B.

Imagine you’ve spent a week, a month, a year out on the ocean. Now erase the boat, forget the forward motion, freeze the ocean solid, and watch wind scuff the snow. Are you living in a place or in your head? Now imagine you’re in a small community on the ice cap, say at the US base at the South Pole. What stories are there but those you bring or create with your coworkers? You can put on your parka, clomp down out of your elevated building to look around, even walk out beyond the perimeter of buildings and lines of cargo, but there is no other world in the otherworldly icescape. What Antarctica offers in place of a story is the absence of what we think life should contain.

For now, understand that when the rest of the world’s ice melts, East Antarctica will be unchanged for a reason.

Just as a reminder: Antarctica contains 6.1 million cubic miles of ice, 90 percent of the planet’s total and 70 percent of its available fresh water. The Antarctica entry in the CIA’s World Factbook provides some perspective: “arable land: 0%, permanent crops: 0%, other: 100%.” Ice covers an estimated 99.6 percent of the continental surface. If it all melted, sea level would rise over two hundred feet. Luckily, about 90 percent of the ice is locked up in East Antarctica. While some of that may tag along in the disintegration of West Antarctica and the major ice shelves, amid the global crisis you would still find plenty of flat white space to call your own.

On his 1908 Nimrod expedition, Ernest Shackleton and three of his men became the first to trudge deep into the East Antarctic interior. The trip nearly cost them their lives. In a remarkably stoic attempt to be the first at the South Pole, they pioneered a route from the Ross Ice Shelf up the Beardmore Glacier in the Transantarctic Mountains to the East. One of the hard facts of Shackleton’s journey was that the ice of the East was as deep as the mountains they climbed to reach it. Another was that the margin between life and death up there was far thinner than even the brilliant Shackleton had imagined. Still 200 miles shy of the Pole, Shackleton was compelled to record his constant headache: “The sensation is as though the nerves were being twisted up with a corkscrew and then pulled out . . . The Pole is hard to get.”

They manhauled their sledge in late summer temperatures as cold as –40°F, made worse by gale-force wind-chill. They stretched their meager rations to starvation levels, despite burning perhaps ten thousand calories in a day, but finally halted about ninety-seven miles from the Pole. Shackleton famously described the heart-rending decision to turn back—cribbing from Ecclesiastes—as choosing between offering his wife a dead lion or a live donkey. As it turned out, rancid pony meat was already on the menu, along with biscuit fragments and tea. On the 800-mile return journey, growing weaker, they were often down to their last morsel as they reached their next scanty depot. A single major storm could have delayed and killed them, as it did the similarly desperate Robert Falcon Scott—a fellow British explorer—a few years later.

It was in the context of his East Antarctic suffering that Shackleton scrawled in his journals, “Self is a subject that most of us are fluent on.” The excruciating minutiae of frostbite, hypothermia, altitude sickness, snowblindness, hunger, self-doubt and dysentery (from the pony meat) Shackleton was reticent to describe in his journal, but he did pause to poetically note their cumulative effect: Antarctica had turned them inward. All difficult journeys can isolate the traveler from his surroundings, but Antarctica is unique in offering so little to turn away from.

When he did look outward, Shackleton found little to say. Once through the mountains, he found a “waste of snow.” The Ross Ice Shelf he had called a “changing sea,” so the high ice of the East became a “changing sky.” In this he was referring partially to its appearance but mostly to its texture; they slogged though soft snow, or over steep sastrugi (small waves of hardened snow), or both, in all cases making for the worst manhauling of the journey. At their Furthest South, 88° 23’, which they reached by scurrying toward the Pole for five hours without their tent or “nightmare of a sledge” at their heels, they planted the Union Jack, placed beneath it a brass cylinder containing stamps and documents, and gazed southward with binoculars. They saw only a vast continuation of the “dead white snow plain” to which they had just lay claim.

That claim, the King Edward VII Plateau, is now defunct, replaced in 1912 by Roald Amundsen’s Norwegian flag (the first to stand at the South Pole) and claim to the King Haakon VII Plateau, also now defunct. The political geography that replaced both of them, during the early twentieth century transition from dogs and sledges to snowmobiles and planes, is a collection of massive, often overlapping, wedge-shaped possessions that flare out from the Pole along lines of longitude toward the Antarctic Circle, exactly like pieces of pie. These belong to Britain, France, Norway, Australia, New Zealand, Chile and Argentina. (The only unclaimed portion is the bulk of West Antarctica, from 90 degrees west to 150 degrees west; it is the only unclaimed land on Earth. In a strange coincidence, it is also the Antarctic region most dramatically threatened by climate change.) Each of these pieces was based in a nation’s proprietary exploration of a stretch of coast, where definable geography exists. The cartography of the interior, as far as anyone was concerned, was merely lines on a blank map.

While these governments initially responded to the emptiness in predictably covetous fashion, all claims to the Antarctic are now in abeyance. The Antarctic Treaty, signed in a spirit of scientific and political camaraderie based partly in the success of the 1957 International Geophysical Year (IGY)—a massive Soviet/European/North American joint inquiry into polar and solar geosciences—and primarily because of the ice’s uselessness, set Antarctica aside strictly for scientific purposes. Other than for logistics, military activity was banned. The Antarctic Treaty, written in 1959 and signed now by forty-six nations, was the first arms control agreement to emerge from the Cold War, and is still a model of international cooperation. That said, any government with a serious interest in future Antarctic resources first became a signatory to the Treaty and then got busy making a permanent place for itself down south.

The Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, an American base, has squatted at the geographic nexus since 1956 without making any formal declaration of ownership. The US neither makes nor recognizes any Antarctic claims, but has reserved the right to do so. In the revealing 1997 Report of the US Antarctic Program External Panel, a Congressional review of our presence in Antarctica, things were laid out plainly: “The geopolitical importance heretofore assigned to a permanent US presence in Antarctica, particularly at the South Pole, appears fully warranted. This consideration, in itself, justifies a year-round presence at several locations, including a moderate-sized facility at the Pole, along with necessary supporting infrastructure” (italics original). So much for the primacy of science. The External Panel went on to describe our occupation of the Pole as “support for responsible governance of a non-sovereign territory,” though it may be described more succinctly as the omnipresence of empire.

The traditional claimants have paid lip service to the Treaty while going to great lengths to support their Antarctic and sub-Antarctic territories. New Zealand, for example, regularly creates new postal stamps celebrating its Ross Dependency; Britain went to war in 1982 to prevent Argentina from confiscating the Falkland Islands, which once anchored their claim; and in 1978, Argentina flew a pregnant woman down to a scientific station to give birth to the first Antarctic “citizen,” one Emilio Marcos de Palma.

The growing interest in Antarctica by governments around the Earth continues to disrupt the silence. There are thirty nations operating roughly sixty-four year-round and seasonal research facilities in the region. India and China are stepping up their presence in accordance with their rise to global power. Alternative visions of apportioning the continent have been proposed; Brazil, for example, suggested that a longitudinal “view” from the South Pole could identify those nations whose coastlines were “visible” from the Antarctic and then give them a proportional piece of the ice. (You can guess which South American nation wins out on that one.) More importantly, there have been persistent complaints raised by poorer nations—in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere—who cannot set up camp down south, that control of international territory should not reside only in the hands of a few countries. In the 1980s, that argument of illegitimate governance of Antarctica as the supposed “common heritage of mankind” reached the floor of the U.N. General Assembly. When the dust settled, the Antarctic Treaty community had widened its membership slightly, but doubts remain.

The Nimrod held up in the ice (Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia).

In an energy-hungry future, it is unclear whether the administration of Antarctica would survive a fierce international dispute. The few administrative bodies, the ATCM (Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting), the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat, COMNAP (Committee of National Antarctic Programs) and SCAR (Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research), have no executive or judicial power over the Treaty’s signatory nations. That power, as far as it exists in such a lightly-structured political scene, rests perhaps with the U.N. and more likely in the usual diplomatic offices of the more powerful nations. From the beginning, the underlying claims have been politely ignored. Cold War politicians could act nobly toward the distant, difficult ice; tomorrow’s petroleum-dependent nations may not.

Would the Antarctic Treaty be strong enough to discourage a determined unilateral exploration for offshore oil? Could an oil-thirsty signatory nation back out of the Treaty? The Treaty asks merely that nations in a dispute “shall consult among themselves with a view to having the dispute resolved by negotiation, inquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement or other peaceful means of their own choice.” Failing to come to civil terms by those means, the disputing parties could take their case to the International Court of Justice, if they so choose.

In 1991, the Antarctic Treaty community adopted the Protocol on Environmental Protection; chief among its accomplishments was a moratorium on mining (including drilling for oil). Again, however, the legal ramifications extend only to a plan for arbitration. When I asked Jim Barnes of the respected environmental network ASOC (the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition) what defenses were in place beyond the Treaty to deal with an oil-prospecting signatory nation, he said, “Simply put, there are none beyond peer pressure . . . Moreover, if the states in question were not [Treaty] members or Protocol adherents, the picture is even murkier.” In this dark scenario, we are left only with resistance from environmental groups and calls for restraint from those usual diplomatic offices.

No one knows what deposits—I imagine them as the residue of dinosaurs and ferns from the Permian, before the Antarctic continent slid out of the tropics into the polar region—may exist below the ice or the ocean floor. The DOE’s Energy Information Agency website describes a fifty billion barrel estimate for the Ross and Weddell Sea areas, part of what may be the world’s “last supergiant oil field.” (Again, this is only an estimate, as no exploration has been done.) In a speech to a SCAR committee in 2006, the noted Iranian oil expert Dr. Ali Samsam Bakhtiari said, “At $US150 or $US200 [per barrel] it would make economic sense to exploit even Antarctic energy.” This was at a time when those prices seemed pie-in-the-sky. “[Antarctica] is the big—and the last—question on the globe for the oil industry,” Bakhtiari said, and “the day they decide, they will go in.”

Despite Dr. Bakhtiari’s stark assessment, it’s unclear if the changing climate will allow access to Antarctic oil. We can assume that for the foreseeable future Antarctica’s weather and waters will remain the most difficult on Earth. Katabatic winds fall off the ice caps like freight trains. Icebergs are innumerable. The massive gyre of sea ice in the Weddell Sea that caught and destroyed Shackleton’s ship Endurance in 1915 is still a dangerous place for modern icebreakers (as the 2007 sinking of the ice-strengthened MS Explorer in the much gentler Bransfield Strait reminded us). The expansion of sea ice every winter around Antarctica—effectively doubling the continent’s size and sealing off its ocean approaches—is the single greatest seasonal event on the planet.

Meanwhile, thousands of scientists and graduate students are busy studying Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. What role these gleaners of data will play in fending off the nationalists and the energy extractors is yet to be seen. One potential irony is that as researchers learn more about the role of Antarctica in global climate change, the role of Antarctica in global energy politics may change so much that the voices of science will lose their relevance. This isolated scientific commons may succumb to the geopolitical commons.

Already in the Antarctic there’s a hint of the assertiveness we’ve seen up in the warming Arctic. No one is boldly planting flags in the seafloor of the Southern Ocean (as Russia did in the Arctic), but things are heating up. Despite the success of the 2007/2009 International Polar Year (IPY), the fifty-year follow-up to the IGY, scientific cooperation cannot guarantee future political cooperation. At the same time that scientists from over sixty nations were jointly studying physical, biological, and social topics in the polar regions, some of their governments were altering the political paperwork. Signatories to the Antarctic Treaty cannot expand their old claims, but the Treaty ran afoul of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, which mandated that coastal nations define (or forfeit) their ownership of continental shelves by May 2009. Nations were caught between an ethical prohibition and a necessary acquisition. In the end, Australia quietly mapped its Antarctic waters, while New Zealand formally reserved the right to do so; both, it should be said, have also restated their allegiance to the Treaty.

More notably, the U.K. is laying a bold claim to one million square kilometers (386,000 square miles) of seafloor off its piece of the pie, in defiance of Chile and Argentina (who have each declared rights to Exclusive Economic Zones in the area) and nearly a dozen other nations who have bases along that coastline. They’ve made claims around the Falklands and South Georgia as well. In preparation for the coming crises in energy, water, and food, the Foreign Office seems to be looking south and throwing down the gauntlet.

No other nation, traditional claimant or otherwise, has filed a request for recognition of their piece of the Antarctic continental shelf, though they may be diplomatically waiting until the last minute. Perhaps history will record the half-century of peaceful co-existence between the IGY and the IPY as an anomaly of the modern era, a transitional period while we with one hand preserved the polar landscape and with the other prepared to make it useful.

So if you’re planning to hide in East Antarctica’s white space during the coming destabilization, keep in mind that you will be trespassing. That said, I wouldn’t worry about hassles from a border patrol. As Apsley Cherry-Garrard, a survivor of Robert Falcon Scott’s expedition and the best writer from Antarctica’s age of exploration, pointed out in The Worst Journey in the World: “No Foreign Office can trace the frontier between King Edward’s Plateau and King Haakon’s.” Whatever happens in the name of national self-interest, for whoever hunkers down between the lines of longitude, most of interior East Antarctica should remain cold, isolated, and simple, little more on the map than what one writer has called a “known white spot.”