Norway claimed Queen Maud Land five days before a German expedition arrived
On 14 January 1939 Norway annexed a slice of Antarctica about the size of India. Five days later a German ship reached the pack ice offshore, and its aircraft began dropping swastika-marked darts across the ice to stake a rival claim. The race decided who controls a fifth of the continent today.
Queen Maud Land covers roughly 2.7 million square kilometres of East Antarctica, between the British and Australian claims. It was the first part of the continent anyone saw, sighted by Fabian von Bellingshausen on 27 January 1820, yet among the last explored, because mapping it needed both ships and aircraft. Norwegian interest grew out of whaling and sealing voyages funded by the shipowner Christen Christensen and his son Lars. In 1930 Hjalmar Riiser-Larsen became the first person known to set foot there, and the land was named after Queen Maud, wife of King Haakon VII.
Whaling was the real motive. In the 1930 to 1931 season, 265 whaling ships, mostly Norwegian, worked its coast, and Norway wanted to secure that access. Germany sent Alfred Ritscher's expedition aboard the Schwabenland, which photographed about 350,000 square kilometres from the air and later sought to claim it as New Swabia. That hope ended with Germany's defeat in the Second World War. Since 1961 the territory has been part of the Antarctic Treaty System, a demilitarised zone.
Most of it lies under the East Antarctic ice sheet, and a wall of ice 20 to 30 metres high lines nearly the whole coast, leaving only a few places to land from a ship. Some 150 to 200 kilometres inland, mountain peaks break through ice that averages about 2,000 metres thick; the highest, Jøkulkyrkja, rises to 3,148 metres and was first climbed in 1992. Beneath the ice, the coastline would resemble Norway's or Greenland's, full of fjords and islands.
No one lives there permanently. Twelve research stations host at most about 40 scientists, and intercontinental flights connect with Cape Town. Norway's Troll station went year-round in 2005, opened by Queen Sonja, the first queen to visit Antarctica, and in 2015 King Harald V became the first reigning monarch to set foot on the continent.
Source: Queen Maud Land
