Policy & Governance · Antarctica

Times Square Ice Installation Backs Antarctic Peninsula Marine Protected Area Before CCAMLR Meeting

Conservation groups froze a surfboard from a Gauchos del Mar expedition in a block of ice during Climate Week NYC to gather signatures for Domain 1, a proposed marine protected area off the Antarctic Peninsula that has failed to win consensus since Argentina and Chile tabled it in 2018.

By SEVENSEAS Media | Policy & Governance

On 22 September, during Climate Week NYC, a block of ice taller than a person stood on the pedestrian plaza in Times Square with a red surfboard frozen inside it. The board had travelled to the South Shetland Islands and the Antarctic Peninsula with the Argentine brothers Julián and Joaquín Azulay, and through the day the ice was left to melt around it while passers-by were invited to scan a code, watch the brothers’ film and sign a petition.

The installation was organised by the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition (ASOC), a coalition of conservation groups that attends Antarctic Treaty meetings as an observer, together with Fundación Marejada and the brothers’ production company, Gauchos del Mar. The petition asks governments to protect Domain 1, the waters of the western Antarctic Peninsula and the southern Scotia Arc. The organisers say more than 45,000 people had signed by the time the ice went up in New York.

Manhattan was the third city. The same board was sealed in ice beside the Obelisco in Buenos Aires in May and in Rome on World Oceans Day in June, according to the campaign.

What is being proposed

Domain 1 is one of the planning areas the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) uses in its work on marine protected areas. Argentina and Chile formally introduced a protected area proposal for it at the Commission’s 2018 meeting and have revised and resubmitted it since. Australia, which co-sponsors separate proposals for East Antarctica and the Weddell Sea, lists itself among the proposal’s supporters.

As the campaign describes it, the plan has two parts. A general protection zone would cover the Bransfield and Gerlache straits and close the coastal feeding grounds of penguins, seals and whales to krill fishing. A second zone would stay open to commercial krill fishing under CCAMLR’s existing rules.

The krill fishery

Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba) are small crustaceans that feed much of the Southern Ocean food web, from penguins and seals to baleen whales. In the Atlantic sector, which CCAMLR calls Area 48, the fishery runs under a trigger level of 620,000 tonnes a year across its main fishing subareas.

Until 2024 a separate rule, Conservation Measure 51-07, spread that catch across several subareas so that it could not all be taken close to the peninsula. Members did not renew it. In 2025 the catch reached the trigger level for the first time and the fishery closed on 1 August. Mongabay reported that some observers blamed the lapsed measure. ASOC has argued that it led to more concentrated fishing than ever before.

It happened again this year. The trade outlet The Fish Site reported that the 2026 season ended on 12 August when the limit was reached. The same report, which draws on the fishing company Aker BioMarine, notes that 620,000 tonnes is less than one per cent of the roughly 63 million tonnes of krill estimated in a 2019 survey. The conservation argument is less about the total than about where it is caught. Speaking to Mongabay last year, ASOC’s executive director Claire Christian pointed to the direct overlap between the fishing grounds and the places where hundreds of thousands of penguins, whales and seals feed.

At the 2025 meeting Norway proposed a new management approach that would have raised the annual limit to nearly 1.2 million tonnes. It was not adopted.

Why nothing has passed

CCAMLR decides by consensus, so any one of its 27 members, 26 countries and the European Union, can stop a measure. At last year’s meeting Russia and China blocked all three pending protected area proposals, according to Mongabay, which said neither delegation responded to its request for comment. The Commission has designated one very large protected area so far, in the Ross Sea in 2016, after several years of negotiation.

In October, governments have an opportunity to protect Domain One as part of a representative system of marine protected areas across the Southern Ocean.

Claire Christian, Executive Director, ASOC, in the campaign press release

The film

The installation promotes Antarctica – Domain One, the seventh feature by the Azulay brothers. It follows them sailing, hiking and surfing through the South Shetland Islands and along the peninsula, alongside the biologist Rodolfo Werner and the researcher Manuel Novillo, whose fieldwork covers krill, fish and glaciers. Kelly Slater narrates the English version and Ricardo Darín the Spanish one. The film was released free on YouTube in May, and the organisers say UNESCO’s Ocean Decade has recognised the film and campaign as a Decade Activity.

“Antarctica belongs to all of humanity,” Joaquín Azulay said in the campaign’s release. The film was made with commercial backing. Prada, Scarpa and Citizen appear on its poster alongside ASOC, SeaLegacy, Fundación Marejada and Agenda Antártica.

What a petition can do

Signatures have a mixed record at CCAMLR. In a 2021 paper to the Scientific Committee, ASOC reported that it and its partners had collected 1.5 million signatures that year calling for Antarctic protected areas. Domain 1, East Antarctica and the Weddell Sea are all still undesignated. A melting surfboard in Times Square will not change a veto in Hobart. What it can do is make a negotiation held largely out of public view visible to people who would otherwise never follow it.

The October meeting

The Commission meets in Hobart in the second half of October. The dates proposed at last year’s meeting were 19 to 30 October. The Fish Site reported that the Domain 1 proposal and a revised approach to managing the krill fishery are both due for consideration.

From the expedition and Times Square

Swipe or scroll sideways to see all nine photographs.

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Antarctica – Domain One is free to watch on the Gauchos del Mar YouTube channel. The campaign petition is linked from the Gauchos del Mar website.

SEVENSEAS Media · Conservation Journalism for the Ocean