Coal in Antarctica: an unignited history

This talk explores the scientific search for coal in Antarctica in the twentieth century. Although mining in Antarctica was banned by the Madrid Protocol in 1991, the dream of digging or drilling for useful minerals and hydrocarbons animated Antarctic exploration and science from its earliest days. Here, Alessandro discusses two major moments of coal investigation. The first, during the 'Heroic Age', especially by the Australian TW Edgeworth David and the American Laurence Gould, framed coal as rich and exploitable. The second moment, from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, by a group of American coal geologists, framed coal as a remnant of Earth's deep history, especially of the Gondwanaland megacontinent.

Alessandro Antonello is associate professor in environmental history at the University of Tasmania, which he joined in January 2025 having previously worked at Flinders, Melbourne and Oregon. His work to date has focussed especially on environmental and international histories of Antarctica and the world ocean in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He is the author of the book The Greening of Antarctica: Assembling an International Environment (2019).