Part of the utility of antarctica is in its inaccessibility and restrictions on what you can do there. e.g. it's currently one of the best places to sample the earth's atmosphere because treaties bar things like lighting fires.

Surely you can do similar sampling far away from shipping lanes on the south pacific and atlantic (point nemo like locations?).

I imagine a giant dome city architected from the ground up to not disturb what's outside of it too much. Complete with farms and ecosystems and a fixed human population limit and powered by a nuclear power plant.

You can't put a nuke plant their either, until the treaty on the Antarctic runs out. The restrictions come from not wanting anyone to do mining or war down there.

Argentina has even stopped trying to make human settlement on the continent a thing a while back.