France’s new polar strategy suggests the battle over mining is no longer about the year 2048, or even what comes after. It is already underway – French polar ambassador Olivier Poivre d’Arvor told Antarctic Insight.
Rosgeo, the Kremlin’s mineral explorer, is by now known to be mapping the Antarctic for the oil and gas that Russia and other states are banned from exploring. Yet, the unspoken understanding among Antarctic Treaty states is that you should not rock the icebreaker if you are on it. The explorer has never been called out by the Antarctic Treaty consultative meeting – the region’s 29-state annual governance forum – even though it may be argued that its geological operations are at best diplomatically corrosive and also violate international law.
The Madrid Protocol’s ban on mining, signed in 1991 after France and Australia had abandoned Antarctica’s 1988 Wellington mining pact, is still praised as the poster child of international seabed protection.
As the ban is officially known, “Article 7” is an unsinkable ship in the high latitudes of geopolitics. The Protocol’s review clause, which kicks in after 14 January 2048, does not have an expiry date. It is too complex to undo, the legal cliché goes. Mining south of 60°S is not a material threat. The region is too extreme for commercial extraction. Anyone suggesting the polar opposite, as Antarctica’s NGO community has habitually framed it, must be in thrall to some sort of delusional “El Dorado complex”.
France, the only EU state with a territorial claim in Antarctica, is one of Article 7’s de facto architects – but it is no longer speaking that way.
‘Indispensable political shift’
For Quai d’Orsay, the Arctic at the top of the world is not just an “El Dorado”. Indeed, it is an “El Dorado explosif”. And the Antarctic at the extreme opposite frontier cannot be separated from its northern counterpart.
“Though the Arctic is obviously an area subjected to high tension and potentially armed conflict, the extent of its wealth of hydrocarbons and rare earths, combined with the maritime commercial interests emerging along the Northern Route, make it an explosive El Dorado,” France’s polar ambassador noted in an email from the science vessel Marion Dufresne this week.
“Antarctica is no exception,” wrote Olivier Poivre d’Arvor, while pitching and rolling among “eight-metre” waves during his current tour of France’s Southern Ocean islands.
Responding to questions from Antarctic Insight, Poivre d’Arvor said that “France’s updated polar strategy marked a significant change” between the 2021 and 2026 editions.
“Working on these subjects with the President of the Republic, I fully embrace this indispensable political shift in our vision for the poles – as much in the North as to the South.”
Poivre d’Arvor identified himself as the “admiring” successor to Michel Rocard, France’s former prime minister and first polar ambassador.
“I still remember his refusal as prime minister and that of Robert Hawke, his Australian counterpart, to sign the Wellington Convention proposed by New Zealand and 18 other countries,” he recalled of the heated 1970s and 1980s Antarctic mining negotiations.
“This Convention made the White Continent potentially exploitable for its mineral resources,” he observed. “Thanks to the fierce defence of the Antarctic Treaty by Australia and France, the Madrid Protocol was adopted in 1991, banning, among others, all exploitation of Antarctic minerals.”
‘Such is the French position: Issue a warning, sound the alarm’
But that was then.
In 2048, “a revision” is “possible”, Poivre d’Arvor continued. Citing climate and geopolitical dérèglement at a global scale, he confessed: “I am not optimistic; indeed, I am almost convinced that a number of important countries – treaty signatories – will be putting to themselves the question of this immense frozen land’s mineral exploitation.”
With his vintage flamboyant flourish, the écrivain emphasised that “it is our duty, two decades before this possible revision … to issue a warning, to sound the alarm. Such is, and will be, the French position.”
“Nothing is assured anymore” for the 1959 treaty’s peace and science cornerstones in “this world of predators and science sceptics”: “Telle est et sera la position française. Rien n’est plus jamais acquis en matière de paix et de science, les deux piliers antarctiques, dans ce monde de prédateurs et de sciento-sceptiques.”
If diplomatic agreements are an inevitable compromise, the 1991 Bush Sr Administration insisted that the ban would be precisely this by demanding the Article 25 walk-out clause, which enables a future world to decide whether or not the ban will stay in place.
The ban may not have an expiry date, but Bush’s envoys expressly opposed a ban that would be immune to expiry; and it seems to be this Russian-branded “gentleman’s agreement” that Rosgeo appears to have had in its crosshairs ever since.
The Akademik Alexander Karpinsky seismic ship, owned by the state explorer’s Polar Marine Geosurvey Expedition (PMGE), has not stopped prospecting the Southern Ocean’s suggested oil and gas reserves since the Hawke-Rocard coup was ultimately enacted in 1998. As seen on the Antarctic Treaty’s shipping register, these voyages have launched as a state programme of the annual Russian Antarctic Expedition from the polar port of Cape Town.
When pressed, Rosgeo’s PMGE subsidiary firm has consistently described its intentions as the classic “science” that Article 7 allows. In PMGE’s shipping diaries, the intent consistently emerges as the opposite: that is, the explicit geopolitical posturing that is inconsistent with the ban’s spirit and letter.
The line between science and prospecting has often been the sticking point on whether the Rosgeo activities violate the ban.
But, as if to suggest it does not give a hoot about those semantics, at the end of July Macron’s Paris selected a port redolent with symbolism to unveil its new polar strategy – the Dufresne’s stopover in Cape Town.
Je m’en fiche. Science is power
Foregoing the stage-managed Antarctic Treaty talks, France’s South African mission unveiled its Arctic and Antarctic strategy to 2030 to a gathering of diplomats and scientists ahead of the Dufresne’s tour of Les Terres australes et antarctiques françaises (TAAF).
For a number of Antarctic Treaty states, the African port city is the photogenic harbour silhouetted by Table Mountain that serves as an air and ocean bridge to the Far South. For Russia, it was also the staging post where the Karpinsky had announced, at the start of the Covid-19 shutdown in February 2020, its mooted discovery of 70 billion tons (500 billion barrels) of oil and gas in East Antarctica’s sedimentary ocean basins.
If recoverable, that’s around 15 years of global annual oil consumption.
The Rosgeo ship had last called in the BRICS-friendly Table Bay in 2023, when waves of high-profile environmental protests and an entourage of domestic and international reporters followed it into the harbour.
Now Brigitte Macron’s former chief of staff cleared his throat and eyeballed the intimate afternoon gathering aboard the Dufresne.
Head of cooperation and cultural affairs at France’s South African embassy, Jean Spiri said Antarctica was still a theatre for science and peace. But it was “not only laboratories for scientists”.
Science, in his telling, was also misused as the currency of power.
“When I say ‘2048’, some people can say, okay, thank you,” Spiri shrugged in confident franglais. “But we are preparing now honestly very important things … a very important mechanism, very important – we are building now the question of this revision.”
France was “strongly opposed” to “mineral resource exploitation, the consequences of which will be more than dire” and would “be committed to defending those principles through the Madrid Protocol and its potential revision in 2048”.
Days ahead of Spiri’s statement, Poivre d’Arvor argued on his own social media page that nearly 45 states had joined a “coalition for a precautionary pause” on deep-seabed mining – a position echoed in the French Council of State’s newly released 2026 Sea and Public Policy report. “THE ABYSS WILL NEVER BE FOR SALE!” he proclaimed.
Macron, also in July, had “addressed” nearly 70 heads of state asking them to join the coalition.
“Coalition, coalition, coalition,” Spiri reaffirmed. France and South Africa, he said, were working together on Antarctic marine protected areas (MPAs).
South Africa’s fraught role
Around Spiri were representatives of an African gateway state through which Antarctic powers continue to project themselves south.
By the end of the afternoon, Ryan Smith, the Democratic Alliance spokesperson for international relations and cooperation, had pushed the language further – but not before breaking out in French.
“Pour les Français,” quipped the former EU interpreter, nailing his colours to the mast, “on me dit que je suis le seul membre du parlement francophone en Afrique du Sud, n’est-ce pas ?”
A statement such as this is hardly a surprise for a card-carrying member of the pro-West, Russia-critical DA, the second-largest party in South Africa’s coalition government.
But it does highlight the fiendishly delicate tightrope walked by a party running the Antarctic portfolio in a coalition government led by the historically pro-Kremlin ANC – which, officially, classifies itself as “non-aligned”.
Since 2022, Ukraine’s Antarctic research and supply vessel, Noosfera, has – after all – berthed less than a kilometre from where the Dufresne was now anchored at the Cape Town Cruise Terminal.
For his part, Smith argued that Antarctica and the Southern Ocean were increasingly overshadowed by the spectres of “economic interest, geopolitical pursuit and mineral exploitation”.
It is a far cry from the ANC’s position. When asked during the early 2023 protests, then-Antarctic ANC minister Barbara Creecy denied, in Parliamentary replies, knowledge of Rosgeo’s seismic blasting. For reasons that may always remain unclear, she claimed efforts were underway “to extend” the non-expiring “ban on commercial mining beyond 2048”.
Cape Town mayor and now DA party leader Geordin Hill-Lewis was less opaque about the ANC-controlled national port.
“Russian state vessels should not be here,” Hill-Lewis, who had jetted into East Antarctica to relaunch Cape Town as a gateway destination, said in February 2023. “All of these Russian war exercises, and the meetings with Russian government ministers, are a shameful moral disgrace.”
Fingered by name: Beijing, Moscow and Washington
Because it ringfences Beijing, Moscow and Washington by name, France’s southern outlook to the end of this decade is likely the most hard-hitting of national strategies issued by Antarctic states in recent years.
“The Antarctic could in the next decade become the next strategic prospect of the great powers, namely the United States, China and Russia,” it notes.
Washington was so worried about exactly the same thing that it led the ban’s reaffirmation at the Helsinki ATCM in June 2023. China’s Draft Law on Antarctic Activities and Environmental Protection gives effect to Article 7; and Russia approved the Protocol’s liability annex on environmental emergencies back in 2013 – seven years ahead of France. (The annex is still, controversially, not in force due to outstanding state approvals.)
A different Washington is now in power. Beijing and Moscow have blocked potentially oil-rich MPAs since 2017.
“These three countries hold indeed nearly 20% of the permanent research stations in Antarctica and, looking ahead to 2048, could position themselves in anticipation of a revision of the Madrid Protocol,” the strategy says. “They would then do so with an approach where the exploitation of the considerable resources of the White Continent could clearly take precedence over their protection.”
For Poivre d’Arvor and his strategy co-author, deputy ambassador Charles Tellier, the Madrid Protocol was “strict” – but only in the “relative” sense.
Breaking le silence
Rare is the letter from a broadsheet editor’s desk that holds to account the actions of state machinery at the annual ATCM – but in 2011 it was a Le Monde editorial that flagged “le silence” of all treaty governments after Russia had tabled a strategy prioritising “complex investigations of the Antarctic mineral, hydrocarbon and other natural resources” among its top objectives.
“À ce jour, aucun commentaire, aucune protestation officielle n’a filtré.” [To this day, no comment, no official protest has filtered through.]
If that is still the case 15 years later, other influential Antarctic powers have, however, begun picking platforms outside the ATCM to lodge their protestations in remarkably quick succession.
- In February 2024, Washington, the Antarctic Treaty depositary, banned all US entities from engaging in commercial transactions with the Karpinsky.
- In June 2025, the UK parliament – after receiving expert testimony about the Rosgeo ship’s “troubling” activities – issued inquiry recommendations featuring a chapter dedicated to “commercial mining” in Antarctica.
- In December 2025, the UK government published its first Antarctic strategy, which commits it to respond to actors that undermine the ban.
- In February 2026, US Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair Jim Risch characterised Russian “exploration” as a violation of Antarctic law.
- In June 2026, Paris published its Stratégie polaire de la France – Équilibrer les extrêmes à l’horizon 2030.
And, in May this year, the Ukrainian fisheries diplomat arrested by Crimean authorities for “promoting” MPAs that allegedly threaten Russia’s Antarctic hydrocarbon interests sent a faultline ripping through the heart of the Hiroshima ATCM.
The Global North bloc called for the release of Leonid Pshenichnov, allegedly also arrested in September 2025 over a Ukraine proposal to cap krill harvests at 70% by restricting continuous trawling. For reasons that may vary, Antarctic Insight learnt that the informal Global South-plus-US bloc did not call for his release.
And in documents that emerged at the same Hiroshima meeting, a single paragraph in a Russian submission revealed that the Karpinsky had returned to Antarctica’s only unclaimed sector somewhere between October 2024 and April 2025.
Sourced by Antarctic Insight, AIS data and additional surveillance information from the Estonian navy showed the ship had likely hidden its location data while off the Pacific-facing sector – in the same season that Russia unveiled its plans to expand its presence here.
The Karpinsky, and all that may be associated with it, seem determined not to vanish while also not wanting to be found.
Hard eructations
Whether or not the ATCM wishes to acknowledge the elephant seal in the room, the beast has already heaved its way onto the decision-making table. It is now indelicately eructing in front of everyone – including the embedded environmental campaigners who are on record about not wanting to be too impolite about any of this.
It is hard to imagine that Russia, one of the 12 founding consultative signatories, was unaware that such a scene would creep into the ATCM when it arrested Pshenichnov in September 2025 – sent to Crimea’s Simferopol pretrial detention centre just before he was due to take his usual seat at the October meeting of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR).
These accelerating events say very little about physical plans to mine the Antarctic.
An emerging South Atlantic pact under presidents Donald Trump and Javier Milei may, in fact, be one step closer to firing any starting gun.
Russia is, however, mining the ATCM’s long-suffering patience – and exposing it as an apparently renewable resource.
Few seem more alive to the value of such a strategy than the Kremlin and – with the June release of its Antarctic strategy – Quai d’Orsay. © 2026 Antarctic Insight