Colombia’s 12th Antarctic Expedition Advances Its Push for Voting Status

Written on 03/19/2026
jhoanbaron
Colombia completes its 12th Antarctic Expedition, advancing its push for consultative status in the Antarctic Treaty. Researchers and crew from the national Antarctic programs of Colombia and Ecuador pose together with the flag of Antarctica. International cooperation during these expeditions reinforces Colombia’s decade-long scientific presence in the region, a critical requirement in its campaign to achieve full consultative status within the Antarctic Treaty System. Credit: Wikimedia Commons (CC0 1.0).

Colombia completed its XII Antarctic Expedition in early March 2026 after 123 days at sea, with the oceanographic vessel ARC “Simón Bolívar” of the Colombian Navy and a C-130 Hércules aircraft of the Fuerza Aeroespacial Colombiana covering 12,666 nautical miles and deploying more than 25 research projects across 33 national institutions, according to the CCO (Colombian Ocean Commission) and the Programa Antártico Colombiano.

That expedition, the 12th since the program began in 2014, fits within a 12-year arc of uninterrupted scientific presence that serves as Colombia’s primary instrument for reaching consultative status in the Antarctic Treaty System, the condition that would give the country full voting rights over decisions affecting the world’s largest freshwater reservoir and a continent whose climate dynamics directly influence Colombia’s own rainfall, ocean currents, and biodiversity.

Twelve expeditions and two institutional memberships

Colombia formalized the Programa Antártico Colombiano in 2014 through the CCO, the state body that coordinates all Antarctic scientific and conservation activities, and since the first expedition in the 2014-2015 austral summer, Colombia has sustained uninterrupted annual scientific presence for more than 10 years, a run that underpins both institutional memberships the country added in the past two years and that Contralmirante Darío Eduardo Sanabria Gaitán, executive secretary of the CCO, describes as the backbone of the consultative candidacy.

In 2024, Colombia was admitted as a full member of SCAR, the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, the leading international body that generates knowledge to inform Antarctic policy, and in August 2025, during COMNAP’s 37th Annual General Meeting, the country became the 34th member national Antarctic program, confirming that its decade of fieldwork had earned recognition from both of the treaty system’s principal scientific and operational advisory bodies.

Those memberships are not merely organizational honors; they show that Colombia’s scientific presence has accumulated institutional weight sufficient for full recognition by the bodies that advise the treaty system.

Scientific diplomacy and the path to consultative status

The Antarctic Treaty, signed in 1959 and now subscribed by 57 countries, divides membership into 29 consultative parties with full voting rights and 28 non-consultative members without a vote. Colombia holds the second tier, having ratified the treaty’s Environmental Protocol through Law 1880 of 2018 and joined the Environmental Protection Committee in 2020, without yet having reached the scientific activity threshold for full consultative standing.

Contralmirante Sanabria says that reaching consultative status requires demonstrating permanent, continuous research activity rather than completing a set number of publications; Colombia has met that criterion without interruption since 2014, and Lieutenant Danna Rodríguez of the CCO’s international affairs office summarizes it as “science for policy,” meaning Colombia designs its Antarctic research explicitly to influence political decisions about the continent’s future.

During the XII Expedition, the ARC “Simón Bolívar” and the C-130 Hércules supported researchers from Chile, Peru, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, functioning as what Rodríguez described as “platforms for international cooperation,” a form of scientific diplomacy that reinforces the consultative candidacy by showing allied nations that Colombia’s Antarctic capacity serves the broader treaty system rather than operating in national isolation.

Worth noting, four Pontificia Universidad Javeriana projects in engineering, architecture, and innovation, developed with Professor Daniel Ricardo Suárez, formed part of the XII Expedition’s scientific core, illustrating how Colombian universities put laboratory and academic capital directly at the service of state-level polar ambitions, at a scale that Natalia Jaramillo Machuca, former PAC scientific consultant, describes as “worth millions and millions.”

The 2025-2035 agenda and a vote in the making

In December 2025, Colombia launched the Agenda Científica Antártica 2025-2035, a ten-year planning document developed by MinCiencias together with the CCO, the foreign affairs portfolio, and the Armada de Colombia, setting research priorities aligned with SCAR’s working groups across four fields: earth sciences accounting for 35% of projects, life sciences 30%, social sciences and humanities 25%, and physical sciences 10%.

​The XII Expedition and the 2025-2035 agenda confirm that Colombia’s Antarctic presence has crossed from episodic participation into sustained institutional commitment, yet whether consultative status arrives in the near term will depend on whether Colombia funds the permanent Antarctic station whose construction the PAC is already projecting and maintains the political will that structural polar science demands across successive administrations.