It's time to keep our promise to protect Antarctica

For more than two centuries, ships from my home state of Massachusetts sailed south into the Southern Ocean that encircles Antarctica. They returned carrying whale oil from a wilderness largely valued for what could be extracted from it.

Today, another vessel built in Britain works those same waters for a very different purpose. The RRS Sir David Attenborough carries scientists, like those from Woods Hole in Massachusetts, not to exploit the Southern Ocean, but to understand and protect it.