A rare rebuke from the Foreign Relations Committee elevates years of quiet prospecting into a test of whether the US will enforce a ban it helped to write.

Washington has, for the first time, publicly criticised Russia's controversial Antarctic oil and gas surveys through Cape Town, South Africa, as a violation of international law - a shift that may hold legal and diplomatic weight.

Unreported until now, the accusation emerged as US Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair Jim Risch spoke during a 12 February nomination hearing for senior State Department posts.

The move signals that this long-standing and technically complex issue has finally cracked the highest levels of American policymaking. But it also exposes a basic problem: Washington does not yet appear to have a strategy on how to respond.

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The Trump administration also appears unclear about whether Russia has breached the 1959 Antarctic Treaty itself or its 1991 Environmental Protocol.

Risch, the committee's senior Republican, delivered the rebuke during a nomination hearing that included Wesley Brooks - President Donald Trump's assistant secretary of state nominee for oceans as well as international environmental and scientific affairs.

Risch told Brooks that Russia's mineral resource activities, documented by Daily Maverick since October 2021, had to be among his top "enforcement" priorities.

"You will also oversee Antarctic Treaty cooperation and enforcement, as well as US research...