Antarctica: Centenary of Scott Expedition

Lord Gilbert Excerpts

Thursday 18th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gilbert]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Baroness on securing this debate. I am particularly keen on thanking her because she has brought to their feet a great many women Peers. She will know very well that, for a long time, Antarctica was a territory forbidden to women. This country had a very bad reputation in that respect; it is doing better than it did; but it is not nearly good enough. The Americans have a ratio of about 60 men to 40 women on their bases. Our record is nothing like as good. The leadership of the noble Baroness is much to be welcomed.

I rise with unusual diffidence because I am fully aware that I am talking about a subject which most noble Lords know far more about than I do. When I tell them that there are actually two Antarcticas—an east and a west—they will tell me that I am teaching them to suck eggs, which is perfectly true, but that distinction is very important. The noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, brought it out when he talked about the ice cores being brought up. The extraordinary fact is that at the bottom of one of them was ice which was formed by snow that had fallen 800,000 years ago. I find one detail even more exciting than that: trapped in that ice was air from about 800,000 years ago, long before any of us was ever thought of.

The whole point is that East Antarctica represents our past; West Antarctica represents our future. If I may burden your Lordships, I recommend to you all reading a marvellous new book written by an Englishwoman called Gabrielle Walker. It is simply entitled Antarctica. It is 350 pages long; I have another 30 pages to read. It is brilliant. Anyone who reads the penultimate chapter alone will take seriously the question of human responsibility for our future as being reflected in the developments in West Antarctica.

I have been very fortunate. I have been down to Antarctica five times. I regret to have to tell your Lordships that that has made me a bit of a snob. I do not regard people who have gone down in a 20,000 tonne cruise ship and got off at the northern tip of the Antarctic peninsula as having visited the Antarctic; they have just had an opportunity for a few nice photographs. Just crossing the Antarctic convergence is not enough for me; to do it, you have to cross the Antarctic Circle, which is quite a difficult thing to do, as anyone who knows the map of Antarctica will confirm.

I never got to the pole, I got as far as 78 degrees, 35 minutes and a few seconds south. I am very ambitious—I hope to persuade the noble Baroness, Lady Sharples, also to be ambitious—to go again and go further south. All the business about 20,000 people a year visiting Antarctica is in my view complete and absolute rubbish.

I was also fortunate in that I completed a circumnavigation of Antarctica in two halves. I now come to my constructive point. I have been very fortunate to visit several emperor penguin colonies. That is not easy. You have to go on an icebreaker, and there are not any around any more making that trip. I seriously suggest to the Government that they set up a programme for secondary school children of a suitable sort to visit Antarctica and have the opportunity to go on a small icebreaker so that they can get through the outer ice, the lees and then the ice on the fringes of the continent itself. Then they can see for themselves the magic of emperor penguin colonies.

Lastly, I want a firm assurance that the Government will support the Antarctic treaty whenever it comes up for renewal.