
Falklands minefields: de facto nature reserves for penguins - gpvos
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-39821956
======
andybak
> "We would rather have left the minefields as they were. They are all clearly
> marked, clearly fenced. No civilian has ever been injured. We said to the
> British government, 'Don't spend the money here, go to some other country
> where they have a much greater need to free up farming land.'"

> "Unfortunately," Elsby adds, "the British government have signed up to the
> Ottawa convention, which puts a duty on them to do this."

> The 1997 Ottawa Mine Ban Treaty compels signatories - which include the UK -
> to clear minefields in territory under their control.

> Since 2009 the British government has spent tens of millions of pounds on
> mine-clearance in the Falklands.

It's quotes like this that make me despair most for human civilisation. Our
inability to design systems - or empower people - with the ability to act
within a loose framework and avoid institutional insanity.

~~~
tgb
I agree but also recommend the book "strategy of conflict" by Thomas
Schelling. It's a counterpoint that shows why highly specific contracts are
important, especially with regards to binding oneself to future actions.

~~~
fidget
His arms and influence is also changed the way I view conflict between states.

------
GuiA
_> Behind their fences, shielded from human encroachment, the penguins have
had decades of peace and quiet in their minefield. Native flora has regrown
around them. "Natural systems have returned to not quite a pristine state, but
a state where you've reached climax communities in certain parts," says Paul
Brickle, director of the South Atlantic Environmental Research Institute._

The Korean DMZ has a similar thing going on:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Demilitarized_Zone#Natu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Demilitarized_Zone#Nature_reserve)

 _" This natural isolation along the 250 km (160 mi) length of the DMZ has
created an involuntary park which is now recognized as one of the most well-
preserved areas of temperate habitat in the world.

Several endangered animal and plant species now exist among the heavily
fortified fences, landmines and listening posts. These include the extremely
rare red-crowned crane (a staple of Asian art), and the white-naped crane as
well as, potentially, the extremely rare Siberian tiger, Amur leopard and
Asiatic black bear."_

------
wuschel
Breeding ground in mine fields and what not.. [1] penguins are hard-core!

Everytime I see the adaptive capabilities of life forms I have to laugh and
cry at the same time. It is certainly worth an internet meme...

    
    
      [1] http://time.com/4660247/planet-earth-ii-clip-penguins/

~~~
cryptarch
Very wholesome, meme/10.

I wish I could up- and downvote at the same time; I feel like discussions
belong at the top and memes at the bottom, but I also enjoy the bits of humor
and less information-dense posts at HN, because they help me to humanize the
community and they make the rest of the discussions easier to process.

Perhaps a "funny" flag could work?

Kind of like on Slashdot, but with a corresponding "showfun" setting, for the
gravely serious user.

A rate or ratio limit for funny posts is needed to not let it spread and
dominate the comments, so maybe a heuristic comment identifier that says "I'm
glad you're having fun, but this post has reached its meme quotum for today.
Have a nice day!" if a threshold is passed would be a solution. That's so much
work to implement though...

I'm conflicted re: what to do with these meta thoughts. Perhaps I should set
up a blog with essays regarding this, and put it there? I do feel it is on
topic as in, "in the HN spirit" and relevant to what I'm responding to re:
form, but not the content.

------
PaulRobinson
I did a contract down in the Falkland Islands in 2002 for Cable & Wireless,
and was in Stanley for about a month with a weekend on Sealion Island. Things
the HN crowd might be interested in:

When I arrived an army officer in camo fatigues got up on the (tiny) baggage
claim carousel before it started running and gave us a brief introduction to
how to spot landmines, and instructed us how to obtain ordinance maps of the
known existing fields if we wanted to go for a walk one day. I got one and
gave it to a friend as a present. I believe he has it framed in his home.

That beach they are discussing looks astonishing and there is little doubt if
it's reopened it will not remain "wild" for a long time. That said, ozone
depletion is still a thing, and whilst the climate is like Northern Scotland,
there are sunny days but sun-bathing is not encouraged. Young military
personnel are rumoured to occasionally try it, have to get treatment for quite
skin burns, and because it's a self-inflicted injury will get court
marshalled.

Sometimes a penguin or other animal will actually set off a mine on that
beach, or at least did in my time there - you'd hear a distant boom, and it
was just assumed one had been triggered. However, it's a huge area to clear.
Strangely, I seem to recall there had been an offer from a foreign government
to run mad cows or unwanted apes along it to try and trigger the mines.
Thankfully, it was never taken up.

There is a lot of ordinance in the islands. After the war, some of the locals
picked up discarded Argentinian weaponry and ammunition and stored it for use
in case of another future attack. I sincerely hope that most of it is now
discarded.

More tech information for this crowd: back then, all phone and data ran over a
microwave network rated to 9600 baud but some could get 56kbps modems running
well over it. There is a small machine room, and we were running Solaris 7 on
Sun kit back then. I got the gig as I was familiar with Zeus which was their
preferred web server at the time.

Connectivity was via a (very large) satellite dish back to the UK via a
geostationary satellite. 1Mbps was the max transfer rate, and ping times back
to the UK were > 500ms. They had investigated running fibre optic into the
islands, but they (naturally) wanted to avoid that coming in via Argentina, so
they'd costed running it up to the US straight up the Atlantic. It was doable,
but would cost 10x the then national GDP of the islands, so, yeah, noooo…

It's a very beautiful place with lovely people, and I imagine the connectivity
is much better than it was 15 years ago - if you ever have the chance to visit
or work there, I'd definitely consider it, but the routes in are limited: MoD
flight from RAF Brize Norton, via Santiago, or cruise ships sometimes stop by.

They actually suggested I might want a full time gig down there. Being in my
early 20s and single it wasn't for me, but I could see for the right person,
it's a pretty amazing place.

------
pgodzin
Seems like demining is done manually - slow and dangerous. I'm surprised we
can't build the tech to identify mines and extract them safely.

~~~
mschuster91
Any robot capable of doing the neccessary manual digging would be so heavy it
'd certainly trigger the mines; also as you can see in the photos the land is
not flat but highly varied, so a robot cannot drive there.

Another thing that makes demining really tedious is the amount of scrap metal
in the earth - and if it's former farm land that's been mined it's bound to
have loads of metal in it, mostly remains of agricultural equipment, and on
the minestrips of former Yugoslavia you often enough hit archeological
artifacts during mine-clearing.

If you wanted to do automated demining, you'd need:

1) scanner technology that can differentiate between scrap metal and mines, as
well as penetrate at least 1-2m into the ground

2) robots on 2 legs and with 2 arms - basically, humanoid robots. Anything
other is only usable on flat fields.

3) robots must be able to conquer vast amounts of vegetation. For example, the
Yugoslavian wars were 2 decades ago - many of the minestrips that are still
not cleared up are in the backside of the country and heavily overgrown by
everything from grass to massive trees now. (Source: am half Croatian, seen
some minefields)

4) robots with high-quality visual processing. The most devious mines are
those that have been hidden in / masqueraded as stuff like old cans, soccer
balls or other stuff that children pick up, play with it and boooom. Any robot
which has to do demining in such areas must be able to detect and avoid these.

5) cheap robots. A single robot with above capabilities will run well into the
8-figures at the moment (esp. due to #2), a human is cheaper (especially as
there's protective armor available that helps to prevent or soften severe
injuries).

~~~
SomeStupidPoint
I don't see why 4 legs wouldn't work.

We see 4 legged animals in forests and on mountains, seeming to donjust fine
navigating the terrain (and often doing better than humans).

~~~
thaumasiotes
Nah, it just can't be done unless you have two legs and two arms.

------
hayd
The British should be able to bill the Argentinian Government for the mine
removal.

~~~
mrleinad
How about returning the islands they stole, instead? We're happy to clean the
mines ourselves. It's not like they're anywhere close to London, are they?

~~~
bulutsuzku
British still seem to believe they are legit in the Islands. It is actually an
occupation since 1833.

~~~
tjalfi
99.8% of residents voted to remain a UK Overseas Territory in 2013[0]. If
that's an occupation then it has pretty overwhelming popular support.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falkland_Islands_sovereignty_r...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falkland_Islands_sovereignty_referendum,_2013)

~~~
fmmseptiembre
What could be expected? Most local population on Malvinas these days is of
British origin.

~~~
int_19h
Most local population on Falklands has been of British origin since, what,
1840?

Ultimately, the important part is that there are no living people, whether on
the islands or elsewhere, who are harmed by British control of the island, and
there are plenty of living people who would be harmed by it being ceded to
Argentine.

~~~
mrleinad
All argentineans are harmed. We're being plundered from our natural resources
by the UK.

~~~
int_19h
If we're unwinding back almost 200 years to reach that conclusion, why not go
600? Have you appropriately compensated the native Argentinian tribes for the
natural resources that _you_ have plundered from them?

~~~
mrleinad
We're talking about modern countries, not prehistoric societies. Please try to
keep up.

~~~
int_19h
We are? Do people in "prehistoric societies" (whatever that is supposed to
mean) not have rights to territory, or to natural resources?

In any case, _I_ was definitely talking about people, not countries - this is
clearly spelled out in the comment that started this thread. I don't care
about countries. They only exist to serve the people, and any such rights they
claim above and beyond that are illegitimate.

------
pc2g4d
Could they be disabled by electromagnetic pulse??

------
ick
We

------
ptaipale
Click-bait headline from BBC.

TL;DR: Penguins are not heavy enough to set off landmines left by Argentinians
in Falklands War. Plenty are left, now the British government has to clear
them due to Ottawa convention, and this will disrupt penguins and the
ecosystem.

~~~
gpvos
Yes, the title is unfortunate. The conflict between the Ottawa convention and
the environment is the interesting bit.

~~~
duncan_bayne
It's only a conflict until you base your value judgements on human
flourishing. Then it becomes a relatively easy question - does humanity
benefit from having the land mines removed? Pretty sure that anyone living in
or around minefields has the answer to that one.

~~~
ptaipale
Someone living around minefields answers in the BBC story:

 _" Falkland Islanders weren't enthused by the idea, to put it bluntly," says
Barry Elsby, a member of the Falklands Legislative Assembly. "We would rather
have left the minefields as they were. They are all clearly marked, clearly
fenced. No civilian has ever been injured. We said to the British government,
'Don't spend the money here, go to some other country where they have a much
greater need to free up farming land.'" "Unfortunately," Elsby adds, "the
British government have signed up to the Ottawa convention, which puts a duty
on them to do this."_

It looks a somewhat similar nature reserve to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone,
which also acts as a superb nature reserve (also a BBC story):

[http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160421-the-chernobyl-
exclus...](http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160421-the-chernobyl-exclusion-
zone-is-arguably-a-nature-reserve)

~~~
duncan_bayne
Wow. I'm genuinely surprised to find _anyone_ okay with living near
minefields.

My opinions are probably coloured by growing up with Cambodian and Vietnamese
refugees as childhood friends. Their families had strong, and uniformly
negative, opinions about landmines. Sounds like the circumstances were very
different.

~~~
ptaipale
Obviously. The main difference in circumstances is indiscriminate use near
farming lands and dwellings.

Landmines can be used properly or improperly. If you lay them properly, map
them, and clear them when not needed, they're not any more risky than the
typical remains of war (unexploded bombs and shells); less so in fact
(considering Molotov breadbaskets scattered by artillery or air).

The Ottawa convention will be observed by those parties who anyway would have
used mines responsibly (and thereby would have had a cheap, domestic defensive
weapon, instead of paying big bucks to high-tech munition makers).

And those parties who we can expect to behave irresponsibly didn't join the
convention in the first place.

------
yongjik
I'm pretty sure there's no tigers in DMZ. This isn't the Amazon, this is a
strip of land between two belligerent countries whose population densities
make California look like a rural utopia. If there was a tiger, I think we'd
know. :)

~~~
dang
We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14288115](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14288115)
and marked it off-topic.

~~~
yongjik
1\. Makes a "good faith" remark about someone having an inaccurate (AFAIK)
information on a part of land I grew up next to. (OK, calling Seoul "next to"
DMZ might be a bit of stretch, but then Americans consider SV as "next to"
SF...)

2\. Gets declared off-topic.

3\. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

------
bulutsuzku
The Islands were stolen, so anything British do there is open to International
legal issues.

~~~
iso-8859-1
Stolen from whom? The French? Or the US?

------
mrleinad
They're called Malvinas islands, not Falklands.

~~~
justasitsounds
And the name 'Argentina' come from the Spanish and Italians, not from the
Querandí, Mapuche, Serrano, Charrúa, Minuane or Guaraní.

