18 The Legal Regime of the Antarctic

Unlike the Arctic, Antarctica is a real continent—meaning that technically it is a territory, even if almost completely covered with ice—and in fact it is usually referred to as ‘the sixth continent’. Antarctica is the only continent on Earth without an indigenous human population and it is surrounded by an ocean presenting almost no nearby human inhabited outpost. These empirical data are at the core of the very peculiar international regime of the Antarctic region, which cannot be reproduced in the Arctic region, in spite of the evident similarities between the...