The departure and arrival of cruise ships to King George Island, in the South Shetland archipelago, next to the Antarctic Peninsula, is a constant. From a landing strip to the ships and, after several days of traveling along the polar coast, back along the same path, without having to cross the almost always "busy" Drake Passage from South America, the cemetery of so many navigators. in the past. Everything is easy.
During the Antarctic summer of 2023, there were 105,000 visitors in just four months and in a very small area of the continent. The forecasts of similar figures for the current campaign have put scientists and environmental activists on alert regarding the fragility of the environment in which they operate and the lack of clear regulation.
The until now high price of a trip to the southern tip of the planet - although the minimum prices this season from Argentina are already around $5,000 - has not prevented tourism from growing in a place that, until recent times, had been occupied only by scientists and visited by expeditionaries.
In just 10 years, we have gone from 35,000 visitors to that record of 105,000 tourists last season, according to data from the body that controls this activity, the International Antarctic Association of Tour Operators (IAATO, for its acronym in English). . Only during the COVID-19 pandemic was the increase interrupted, after tourist access was prohibited to prevent the coronavirus from reaching the continent, although in the end there were infections in some places.
But now the visitors have returned with impetus. This year, IAATO, the only one that imposes some self-regulation on the sector, has introduced 17 new access limits and restrictions at vulnerable sites in Shetland and the Gerlache Strait. The association detected that too many tourists were coming to watch whales, impacting their behavior. In Gerlache, some studies have already detected high concentrations of sunscreens.
And there are already hundreds of cruise ships that this organization claims to control, to which are added small sailboats and yachts out of control whose passengers can get off in prohibited areas because there is no monitoring. “The northern part of the Antarctic Peninsula can now be reached faster and more comfortably than before, without crossing the Drake, by plane, so it is much more accessible for tour operators. And the more tourists, the more impacts on the natural environment, whether on trampled terrain or animal colonies. Furthermore, the risks associated with ships and airplanes, possible spills, etc. increase,” says scientist Jerónimo López from the Juan Carlos I polar base, one of the Spanish pioneers in Antarctica, a continent he has been visiting for 35 years.
López mentions other more invisible dangers, such as the dispersion of pollutants or the introduction of foreign species into a very sensitive environment. And he recalls that “the presence of persistent organic pollutants, drugs, endocrine disruptors, caffeine, nicotine, traces of sunscreens, etc. has already been detected.”
On the other hand, Gina Greer, executive director of IAATO, assures that this year's new measures “are an example of the continued commitment to operate with the highest standards to provide enriching educational experiences to visitors, while respecting and protecting the region that matters so much to us." But the question is where is the limit.
Upon arriving in Antarctica, it is surprising how many cruise ships, with capacity for between 200 and 400 people, are on the coast of King George, where they wait for those who land on their runway. In such a remote and inhospitable place, it is not unusual to find souvenir shops, groups of kayakers that line the famous “Neptune Bellows” in Port Foster Bay, on Deception Island; or the inevitable remains of soft drink containers on some beaches. You can even see 'graffiti' on some historical ruins of whaling bases.
Very little is still known about the impact that this polar tourism is generating. An exhaustive meta-analysis published in 2022 in Science, signed by the Spanish professor and biologist Javier Benayas, confirmed this after studying 233 scientific works. A third did not relate environmental damage to tourism, although the rest did. There are areas where you don't know what is happening. “The serious thing is that there are many holes to investigate. The impacts are not clear and to do good adaptive management you have to know them,” says Benayas, who will leave for Antarctica in a few days.
This research recalled that the scientific personnel who visit the bases also leave their mark, although their number does not exceed 5,500 a year. “At the moment, most of them are specific and small impacts. They could be solved with additional control measures,” says the scientist.
Some analyzed works have even found advantages in this polar tourism, such as increasing the environmental awareness of visitors. But others not only detect an increase in polluting waste, but also evaluate the carbon footprint they represent. It has been calculated that the CO2 of each Antarctic tourist is about 3.76 tons, as published in Nature, which means the disappearance of 83 tons of snow. Per capita, it is much smaller than that of scientists, but their number multiplies that of the latter almost 20 times.
Other effects that human presence can cause are direct: the late scientist Andrés Barbosa detected that penguins become stressed until their hormonal cycle is altered if visitors come to places where they are not accustomed to human presence; there have been boat strikes against whales; and tourists can carry with them (on their clothes, shoes...) invasive species that, with climate change, will destroy the Antarctic.
Jerónimo López has also published articles on the matter: “We have seen persistent organic pollutants even in fresh water in areas free of glacial ice and in areas near the coast. They are substances that can disperse and accumulate in certain organisms. The Environmental Protection Committee of the Antarctic Treaty will need to strengthen attention to these issues if human pressure continues to increase. “We scientists provide knowledge so that whoever applies can adopt regulatory and protective measures,” he says. This is what happened with respect to the trampled area of moss on Isla Barrientos: after the investigation by the Benayas group, protective measures were taken.
With this panorama of tourism concentrated on dates and spaces, which coincides with the acidification of the oceans, global warming and overfishing around the ice continent, many scientists and activists are once again calling for more and clearer restrictions.
One of them is Ricardo Roura, from the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition (ASOC), which brings together 150 environmental NGOs from 40 countries. Roura, a regular at the meetings of the Antarctic Treaty that governs the continent, believes that something is moving, but little: “In the last two years, France and the Netherlands have led the interest in limiting tourism at the Treaty meetings, where Measures were taken to prohibit landings to go kayaking or similar along the coast or to prohibit the use of helicopters over protected areas, something that in theory should not be done, but is done,” he denounces. “At ASOC we defend that protected areas must be expanded to control tourism more, anticipate impacts, do good monitoring and promote low tourism, that is, slow down the pace of activities so that the pressure is less,” he demands. .
Other scientific proposals include creating an ecological tax for Antarctic tourists, and thus finance more exhaustive research projects on this activity. "We proposed creating an 'ecotax' like in the Galapagos, but the problem is who charges it and how it is managed," says Benayas.
The only one that exists now is that of IAATO itself, which manages landings in Antarctica so that several ships do not coincide in the same place at the same time. With what he collects he pays his staff. “It works, but the problem is that it is not clear how they monitor the ships, because IAATO is part of the companies. In fact, the United States, the country to which half of the cruise ships belong, always vetoes at Treaty meetings any proposal that increases control or limits on tourism," says the biologist, whose team participates in a large Dutch scientific program to delve into all of this.
Another concern is the travelers who go on their own on sailboats and yachts, who do what they want. Although ASOC considers that they are not the most important problem. “Large ships have a system called AIS to know where they are, but they can disconnect it so as not to be located if they enter prohibited areas,” says Roura. In fact, one of the Dutch projects that the Benayas group is working on is based on improving control via satellite and cameras.
But there is not only tourism on the Antarctic Peninsula. It also grows in much colder areas. In Queen Maud Land, the area closest to South Africa, there are two airstrips. In one of them, since last November, an Airbus A340 has already landed. It is operated by the White Desert company, which has a luxury camp to stay nearby, the Wool Fang. From there it offers sightings of emperor penguin colonies and even charter flights to the Geographic South Pole itself. That aircraft can carry up to 380 passengers on each flight. “Little is still known about its impact,” acknowledges Ricardo Rouras.
Elvira Jiménez, spokesperson for Greenpeace, an NGO with a large presence in Antarctica, alludes to the changes that are already occurring with climate change: “We must now regulate with clear standards, not those imposed by the sector itself, but by independent organizations. With climate change, vulnerable areas will increase further as the ice retreats; and there will also be more months of tourist season, which can further expand the offer in a very fragile place, the best preserved on the planet. It is clear that everyone cannot go everywhere,” she argues.
Nobody dares to give figures of the visitors who will arrive this current season. But it is estimated that there will once again be more than 100,000 tourists, including naturalists, adventurers, those who say they are “going to meet people” and those who believe it is “the trip of a lifetime,” according to a survey published two years ago. Hence, ASOC and other entities demand “that the motivation and the impact it can generate be well thought out, before embarking on the trip to a place that is so appreciated.”
