The children who live on Chile’s Eduardo Frei Montalva Air Force Base are pawns in a great game in the Antarctic that they can but dimly understand.

The cluster of snowbound cabins, a 2½hour flight from the tip of South America to the bottom of the world, is home to a permanent population of eighty that includes ten married couples with a total of 12 children, aged 1 to 17. Residents describe the remote outpost as a colonia.

“It’s strange and difficult but it’s super-beautiful,” said Alumna Jofré, 12, whose father is chief of operations at the ice-covered airfield. “We have had amazingly beautiful experiences. We ski and snowboard and sledge.”

There are downsides: “It’s always the same. We go to the gym or to school. We always see the same people. It’s a little complicated.”

Antarctica, once the torment of explorers such as Scott and Shackleton, is slowly being settled by mankind as rival nations make overlapping claims to the vast expanse that is a tenth of the total landmass of the Earth. Global warming, shrinking ice and soaring oil prices all conspire to fuel competition for the world’s final frontier. Britain has rattled its rivals by signalling that it intends effectively to extend its Antarctic territory by more than 50 per cent by claiming an additional 386,000 sq miles (100,000sq km) of the adjoining seabed.

The Frei base sits on King George Island, off the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula on territory claimed by Britain and Argentina as well as Chile. Once a remote whaling station, the island is now known as the unofficial “capital of Antarctica”.

The first surprise on landing in a Chilean military C130 transport aircraft is that my BlackBerry works. I check my e-mail and call my startled wife in New York to tell her that I am surrounded by luminous turquoise-tinted icebergs.

As well as its own mobile phone signal, the Frei base boasts a bank, a post office, a hospital, a supermarket, a bar, a chapel, a school and an FM radio station, provocatively called Sovereignty.

At Russia’s nearby Bellingshausen base, staff have reconstructed a wooden Orthdox church with a decorative spire that was first built in Siberia. At the Great Wall base beyond that, the Chinese operate a gift shop selling penguin statuettes to tourists who come ashore from cruise ships.

A short flight over King George Island in a 12-seat Twin Otter ski-plane reveals not only majestic icebergs sculpted into extraordinary geometric forms and colonies of sea lions and penguins but also groups of corrugated-iron cabins and Anderson shelters that make up the international bases. Argentina, Brazil, Poland, South Korea and Uruguay all maintain year-round research stations near the Chilean, Russian and Chinese bases.

Preventing a new Falklands-style conflict is the fact that Britain, Argentina and Chile are all signatories to the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, which voluntarily freezes the overlapping sovereignty claims. Nevertheless, Chile treats the aircraft ride from the southern city of Punta Arenas on the South American mainland to the Frei base in Antarctica as an internal flight that does not require a passport.

A travel agency in Punta Arenas even offers flights for tourists at $2,500 (£1,200) for a day-trip and $3,500 for an overnight stay at the Chilean base. Once they are there, Chilean soldiers will sell them a souvenir T-shirt emblazoned with a penguin and the words “Chilean Antarctica”.

All three countries continue to affirm sovereignty by deliberately asserting their presence on the icy continent. Linda Capper, a spokeswoman for the British Antarctic Survey, which runs British research stations in the Antarctic, said that Britain performs administrative acts in the territory - a traditional test of sovereignty.

The British Antarctic Territory issues its own postage stamps and all British research stations have their own post office. British base commanders are sworn in as magistrates and conduct official duties such as stamping visitors’ passports. But Britain is lagging in the “baby race” in Antarctica that its rivals Chile and Argentina seem bent on pursuing.

Argentina, intent on establishing sovereignty by having its citizens born in the disputed territory, resorted to flying SÍlvia Morella de Palma, the seven-months pregnant wife of an Argentine army captain, to the Esperanza base that her husband commanded. When she gave birth to Emilio Marcos de Palma on January 7, 1978, he became the first “native-born” Antarctican. Chile responded in kind when Juan Pablo Camacho was born at the Frei base to become the first Chilean born in Antarctica. Residents say that two more Chilean babies have since been born at Frei. No British baby has been born at a British Antarctic research station, Ms Capper said.

The 1991 Madrid Protocol to the Antarctic Treaty declares the icy continent “a natural reserve, devoted to peace and science” and outlaws mining or oil-drilling for 50 years.

But polar experts fear that the rival national claims could lead to conflict as global warming makes it increasingly tempting to exploit mineral resources, such as oil and gas, in the Antarctic, particularly on the more accessible Antarctic Peninsula.

Gazing out over the unspoilt waters, Gino Casassa, a Chilean scientist and member of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said that he is afraid that there will be oil platforms off King George Island in 50 years’ time.

“This is a big threat,” he said. “I would not like to see that happen but it will be inevitable. There will be a big fight over these competing issues: keeping it pristine for scientific work and the exploitation of resources. Especially with deglacierisation, it can become commercially viable.”

Jack Child, the author of Antarctica and South American Geopolitics, said: “Looking ahead 20, 30, 40, 50 years, with new technologies and depletion of oil there might be an attempt to undermine the treaty to get at that oil.”

He said that finding oil on the Antarctic Peninsula was “the worst possible scenario, but also the most possible”.

Britain made diplomatic waves by confirming last month that it may soon file a claim to 386,000 square miles of seabed with the UN, based on the continental shelf extending out from British Antarctic Territory. Chile and Argentina announced that they would lodge similar claims. Chile said that it would reopen its Arturo Prat naval base next year. And China dispatched 91 scientists yesterday to expand its two research stations and build a third station near Dome A, a forbidding inland plateau at an altitude of 4,000 metres (13,000ft).

“Our big concern is that everyone says it’s simply to file their claim, yet it’s clear there is this domino response from the Antarctic claimants,” said Karen Sack, head of oceans for the environmentalist group Greenpeace.

Chile scored a diplomatic coup on Friday by hosting Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary-General, on a visit to Antarctica. Although the UN chief toured bases belonging to Chile, Uruguay and his native South Korea, he flew on board a Chilean military aircraft sitting beside the Chilean Environment Minister and UN Ambassador.

But Mr Ban, perhaps unwittingly, appeared to endorse an idea originally proposed by Malaysia and other developing nations in the late 1980s to declare Antarctica the “common heritage of mankind” – a proposal opposed by Antarctic claimants such as Britain, Argentina and Chile. Mr Ban declared: “This is a common heritage. We must preserve all this continent in an environmentally responsible way.”

‘The world will derive no benefit from it’

— Captain Cook made the first recorded circumnavigation of Antarctica in 1773. Though this helps to establish Britain’s claim to the continent, Cook believed it to be so cold and barren that “the world will derive no benefit from it”

— Britain’s Antarctic claim also rests on ownership of King George Island, claimed in 1819 by William Smith. It was later claimed by Chile and Argentina

— In 1911 the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen became the first to reach the pole. He narrowly beat the British expedition led by Captain Scott

— Ernest Shackleton led another British expedition in 1914-16. His ship, Endurance, became icebound for ten months and he and five others sailed 1,300km in small boats for help

— Britain established a secret Antarctic base during the Second World War, Operation Tabarin. It was the start of a permanent British presence there

— After the war the British Antarctic Survey took the base over as the first of five stations that it now operates on the continent

Sources: Stanford University; Natural Environment Research Council; BAS

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