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What Happens If There's a Murder in Antarctica?

No single government controls the South Pole, so how do they deal with crime?

Matthew Petti | From the April 2026 issue

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Antarctica is the last terra nullius (no man's land) on Earth. Under the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, no state can claim sovereignty over the frozen continent. But thousands of people pass through every year as part of research projects or tourist expeditions. And where there are human beings, there is violence. So how do they deal with crime at the South Pole?

The boring answer is that Antarctic missions usually fall under the jurisdiction of their home country. For example, the manager of the U.S. Antarctic Program's McMurdo Station is required to be a special deputy U.S. marshal. But crime and punishment on the frozen continent have still gone in some pretty weird directions.

In 2000, Australian astrophysicist Rodney Marks died of methanol poisoning while working at a South Pole telescope run by the U.S. National Science Foundation. New Zealand authorities, who performed the inquest on Marks' body, were unable to get their hands on the results of the U.S. investigation or even a list of staff at the base. Detective Senior Sergeant Grant Wormald suspected that someone had purposely poisoned Marks and accused the National Science Foundation of covering up what it knew. To this day, the mystery of Marks' death is unsolved.

There have been a few infamous crimes short of murder in Antarctica. In 1996, the FBI sent agents to arrest a cook at McMurdo Station who attacked a coworker with a hammer. He was sentenced to four years in prison. And in 2018, a drunken Russian engineer attacked a welder with a knife in Russia's Bellingshausen Station, reportedly because the welder was spoiling the endings to books and telling the engineer to dance for money like a stripper. In a dramatic courtroom reversal, the welder forgave him, causing a judge to drop the charges.

There are also nonviolent crimes and prosecutions on Antarctic soil. In June 2025, American private pilot and influencer Ethan Guo took off for Punta Arenas in Chile, then diverted to a Chilean airfield in Antarctica, later claiming he had an emergency. Chilean authorities charged him with filing a false flight plan and detained him at the airfield for months before dropping the charges when Guo agreed to donate $30,000 to a cancer charity.

What about wars? Argentina and Britain had a series of tense but bloodless standoffs over Antarctic islands in the 1940s and 1950s. And during the Falkland War of 1982, the two countries fought over South Georgia, an island just outside the Antarctic Treaty's boundaries, killing four people. Law and war, the two trappings of government, are hard to escape—even in the furthest frontier possible.

This article originally appeared in print under the headline "Murder in Antarctica."

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Matthew Petti is an assistant editor at Reason.

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