I so appreciated this article in The Conversation, about Antarctic tour guides who are quitting their jobs because tourism, which used to be more about seeing the wonders of the continent, is now more about seeing it before it melts — despite these same visitors apparently doing very little to help the last continent avoid this fate (“While tour operators often argue that visiting Antarctica can heighten tourists’ awareness of environmental issues, former guides were struck by guests’ ignorance of human impacts”).
“For anyone interested in nature, few jobs sound more enviable. You spend months among penguins, orcas and glaciers, helping visitors experience one of the world’s most extraordinary and unspoiled places.
But for some guides … [w]atching climate change unfold while helping thousands more visitors reach the continent eventually led them to leave the jobs they’d once dreamed of.”
Antarctic tourism is definitely growing way too fast; when I visited in 2004, there were 20,000 visitors a season — last season, there were 120,000. Within a decade, the continent is predicted to see 450,000. Which is astonishing (not in a good way).
One former tour guide said: “Very often, for long periods of time, the penguins had maybe a few hours’ break during the night. Otherwise there were hundreds of people walking through the colonies non-stop.”
This is an important article, especially for anyone who’s considering a visit to Antarctica. As one guide said, “To this day, Antarctica … stays in the forefront of my head as the most incredibly raw environment that deserves all the care and protection. And I just think tourism and us being there was doing the opposite of that completely.”
If you’re interested in saving the planet, by all means, go to Antarctica if you can. Learn about the effects of human-induced climate change on this magnificent continent and the animals who live there. Learn why we cannot consume seafood and krill supplements while also expecting to see penguins a decade or two from now. Learn everything that’s at stake and why it is so incredibly important to turn things around before it’s too late … then come home and be the change our planet needs.
There’s a scene in Floreana in which Mallory — a penguin researcher returning to the field after a decade away — tells her intern Hannah about the effects of weather on the lives of Galápagos penguins. Though this scene is fictional, the information about the weather and the penguins is real.
“One of the reasons these penguins are endangered is climate change, right?” I say. “Two weather patterns affect them—La Niña, which we’re experiencing now, and El Niño, which has become both more frequent and more severe.” I wave my arm toward the water. “Normally, the cold currents bring the fish and crustaceans to the surface, which is great for penguins. But during El Niño, the water is warmer, which means this food isn’t available. During the last really bad El Niño, back in 1996 and ’97, food was so scarce we lost more than sixty percent of the penguins.”
“It was ’97 and ’98, actually.”
I hadn’t realized Gavin was still nearby, listening. I look at him and again get the sense that none of this will be easy. It feels as if he wants to remind me of how long it’s been, of how hard it will be to step back into my decade-old shoes …
… “So if this is a La Niña year,” Hannah says, “it’ll be good for the penguins because of the cooler water?”
“Good for penguins,” I say, “but it also means less rain and a rougher season for the tortoises and all the animals on land.”
It’s never all good news; this I remember well. In a season when one species wins, others will lose.
In addition to the 1997-98 El Niño event mentioned above, another in 1982-83 caused even more damage — more than 70 percent of Galápagos penguins didn’t survive.
And the El Niño we’re facing right now could be even worse.
NOAA is currently looking at the possibility of a “super El Niño” — a weather event in which the temperatures in the Pacific Ocean are far higher than normal and could wreak havoc on ecosystems. As this article highlights, the effect of a super El Niño could be catastrophic for Galápagos penguins — there are only 2,000 left in the world, and to lose even a small number is devastating.
There’s not much we can about the weather — other than, long term, give up our fossil fuels and halt global warming — but the good news is that we can all help penguins by avoiding seafood and especially fish oil and krill supplements (there are so many better plant-based options!).
Much of the sea surrounding the Galápagos Islands is protected — however, poachers constantly enter protected waters to take fish (and penguins, who are caught as bycatch). And penguins don’t always stay within these protected areas … they go where the food is, which means they’re usually out there fishing where all the humans are fishing. And the penguins cannot catch what they need when they’re up against commercial fishing vessels.
With the oceans and their creatures under so much stress, leaving the seafood for the animals is the best way to help heal the oceans and help the penguins and other animals thrive. 🐧
This startling subhead appeared in a recent Atlantic article about Antarctic travel, in a story that makes very good points about how and why travel to the last continent is becoming a lot less sustainable.
In the eyes of many, we have indeed reached the tipping point. The Atlantic story is just one of several I’ve read lately highlighting concerns with tourism in Antarctica
An Antarctic iceberg melting from below
I was so fortunate to have been able to see this majestic continent nearly two decades ago, and I’ve always responded to readers’ questions about Antarctic travel in a positive way, in part because it is hardly fair to discourage people to go when I myself have been there.
But I also believe that the continent has many other problems that need solving — and that travel to the continent can, in fact, inspire visitors to save what they are bound to fall in love with: the ice, the wildlife, the pristine wilderness that exists nowhere else on Earth.
While decades ago, the human impact of travelers in Antarctica was small, now the impacts are greater — not only the carbon footprint of getting to the bottom of the world, but the introduction of bacteria, invasive species, and the effects on wildlife. As this article points out, “A recent study found elevated concentrations of black carbon – soot – in the snow around popular Antarctic tourism sites, which causes snow to darken and melt more rapidly. Researchers have also identified 14 non-native species around the Antarctic Peninsula, transported on clothing and in food.”
The International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators (IAATO) does an excellent job of encouraging sustainable travel and minimizing impact (yet it does remain a voluntary membership, and not all tour operators are members — those who do travel to Antarctica should be sure their tour company abides by all sustainable travel guidelines).
Ever since My Last Continent was first published, seven years ago, I’ve been pointing out that while tourism does affect the continent, Antarctica has bigger problems: global warming, overfishing, pollution from the fishing industry (from oil spills to discarded fishing gear). My own trip to Antarctica was life-changing — and the continent offers this experience to every potential visitor. If people return from Antarctica with a passion for tackling climate change, protecting endangered species, and making the world a better place, does this not make the trip worthwhile?
It’s not likely that every single one of the 100,000-plus visitors to Antarctica this season returned home and became vegans, stopped driving, committed to a net-zero lifestyle. But if each of them devoted their lives to some form of change for good, this would have an impact. For example, if we as a human species stopped eating seafood, much of the Antarctic’s problems would resolve — the myriad threatened species in the Southern Ocean, from whales to penguins, could have access the food we humans are taking from them, giving them a better chance at survival.
Of course, not all visitors will have such reverence for the continent. The Atlantic notes that “many sightseers bring a whiff of ‘last-chance tourism’—a desire to see a place before it’s gone, even if that means helping hasten its disappearance.” And as this Guardian article points out, “in some areas tourists have traipsed over delicate mosses and plants. Some historic structures have even been scarred by graffiti.” And for many tourists, there seems to be far less interest in learning about the unique landscape, history, and wildlife in Antarctica than in doing things they can do just about anywhere else: climbing, camping, cross-country skiing, paddleboarding, snorkeling.
There is no official cap on the number of tourists who can visit Antarctica, and, as the Atlantic advocates, Antarctica “is actually most valuable to us when left wild, so that it can continue to act as a buffer against climate change, a storehouse of the world’s fresh water, and a refuge for birds, whales, seals, fish, and even the krill that the entire marine ecosystem depends on.”
As this article notes, “Antarctica doesn’t need ambassadors; it needs guardians.” While surely one of the best ways to protect Antarctica may be to leave it alone, at the same time, seeing a place firsthand may be the most powerful way to let it change your life and vow to protect what you were able to witness firsthand so that it will all be there for others to see in the future. As acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton says in this 2010 interview in The Sun magazine: “…the wildlife wouldn’t miss us if we didn’t visit. But the reality is that experiencing wilderness increases the chance that we will preserve it.”
When My Last Continent was first published (hardcover in 2016 and paperback in 2017), I found myself answering a lot of questions about Antarctic tourism. Is it ethical to visit this fragile place? What sorts of harm are travelers doing to the environment? Are visitors hurting the penguins’ chance at survival?
My answer, six and seven years ago, was that travel was the least of the penguins’ problems. These incredible birds are being profoundly affected by climate change and overfishing; the best way to help penguins, I used to say, is to stop eating seafood (especially krill) and to fight for climate protections and marine protected areas. Back then, the number of visitors to Antarctica was not enough to harm penguins directly — especially when considering the emotional impact a visit to this beautiful continent can have. I like to think that most people who see penguins in the wild will begin to devote at least part of their lives to protecting them, whether it’s making changes to prevent global warming or to eat less seafood, or none.
But things have changed quite a lot in the last few years. When I went to Antarctica in 2004, there were about 20,000 tourists a year visiting the continent. By the time My Last Continent was published, that number had doubled. Now, the 2022-23 season expects to see more than 100,000 tourists in Antarctica. That is mind-boggling — and seems to be a sign we’ve reached the tipping point at which Antarctic travel can no longer be sustainable.
There are many reasons why 100,000 waterproof boots on the continent are too many: pollution in the Southern Ocean, possible disruptions to penguins’ breeding cycles, the introduction of foreign objects and viruses — and this article highlights something many of us may not even think of — the effects of marine noise for the underwater animals in Antarctica:
Most of the thousands of scientists and support staff who sail to continental Antarctica every summer smash into the Southern Ocean on ice-cutting hulls. Their engines boom. Their machinery rumbles. Their propellers clatter and hiss from cavitating, collapsing bubbles.
The results of this noise “can cause immediate injury or even mortality” to such tiny animals as krill, which penguins and whales rely on for food. But underwater noise also causes stress to whales and other marine animals. The impacts of noise include “miscarriages; injury; disease; vulnerability to predation; changes in appetite; disrupted mother-calf bonds; panic; anxiety; and confusion.”
Of course, fishing boats also cause noise — and we need to limit their presence in the Southern Ocean as well — and scientific vessels are important and often necessary. But each of us can have an impact by considering why and how we travel. Given the animal lives at stake, is it really worth it?
Antarctica is among my favorite places on the planet, and I feel fortunate to have been able to travel there. But I would not make the same decision to travel to Antarctica as I did nearly twenty years ago. I’d like to see other humans discover the magic of this amazing continent — but the trouble is, the magic will be gone if we travel in numbers too great for the animals, and the environment, to handle.
Currently the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) — established as part of the Antarctic Treaty System and responsible for designating marine protected areas (MPAs) in the Southern Ocean — is struggling, yet again, to create new MPAs in the Antarctic region.
As this article notes, for the sixth year in a row, CCAMLR members couldn’t agree on new MPAs, because two member nations, China and Russia, declined their support.
During a time of unprecedented climate change and mass extinctions across the globe, why is it so hard to agree to protect one of the most fragile (and rapidly warming) areas on Earth?
Scientific American offers a few reasons, from using “‘spurious science’ and other bad-faith arguments” to withhold support, as well as economic interests such as commercial fishing.
As is usual these days, politics seems to be getting in the way of everything, especially progress, and especially when it comes to human and animal rights.
The good news is that every individual has a way to help protect Antarctica. If we stop eating seafood (or even if we simply cut back), we can take away the economic incentive to increase fisheries in these areas where the marine animals need this food far more than we humans do. (We can also eliminate illegal poaching, which happens all the time in areas that do manage to get protection.)
Less commercial fishing also means less pollution, which is a major factor threatening marine species in the Antarctic, especially penguins.
There are bigger issues at stake, of course — the Antarctic Treaty’s environmental protocol is up for review in 2048 — and protecting the continent will ultimately require “concerted, high-level diplomatic activity.”
But for now, we can all do our own small part. Being vegan helps the oceans (and the entire planet) immensely. Traveling in eco-friendly ways helps all animals, all around the world — if we travel at all. And the tiny things we do daily (from walking instead of driving to air-drying our clothes) add up … if we all feel inspired to do them.
