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Andvord Bay, Graham Land on the Antarctic Peninsula. Photographer: Jo Crebbin | iStock.
Are we loving Antarctica to death?
By Geoffrey Williams, Josh Chandler and Emily Clarke | Pictorial Editor Tiffany West
Briefly …
As travel reaches further into some of the world’s most vulnerable environments, the value of access is becoming harder to separate from its cost. In Antarctica, travellers, researchers, guides and operators are confronting a difficult question: how much pressure can an extraordinary place absorb before our desire to experience it becomes part of the problem?
The argument for visiting Antarctica is clearly compelling. Few experiences can compare with encountering its immense landscapes and wildlife firsthand, and tourism can contribute to scientific research, conservation, education and a broader public understanding of a continent most people will otherwise know only through photographs, film and the written word.
The argument for restraint, however, is equally difficult to dismiss. Every visitor has to get there, and the modes of transport they use – ships and aircraft – produce emissions. Visitors disturb wildlife, however carefully their movements are managed, and boots, clothing and equipment create biosecurity risks. Increasing numbers place greater pressure on landing sites, while the very qualities that draw travellers to Antarctica – its isolation, wildlife and extraordinary environment – depend upon keeping those pressures within limits.
It is a contradiction extending well beyond Antarctica. The Arctic, coral reefs, remote islands, deserts, alpine regions and protected wilderness areas increasingly face versions of the same question. Tourism can help protect vulnerable places, while simultaneously adding to the pressures they face.
For David Smyth, Founder of Forward Travel, accepting that contradiction does not require abandoning vulnerable destinations. “I think there is a risk that we can love some places too much, particularly when everyone wants to experience the same places, at the same time and often in the same way. But I don’t believe the answer is simply to stop travelling to vulnerable environments. In many cases, well-managed tourism provides employment, supports conservation and gives an economic value to protecting landscapes and wildlife that might otherwise face very different pressures.”
Smyth believes travellers have an obligation to acknowledge their impact and make informed decisions about how, when and with whom they travel, how they behave once they arrive and where their money ultimately goes. He also defends something more difficult to quantify: the value of actually being there. “I have seen throughout my own travels how standing in a wilderness or encountering wildlife in its natural environment can completely change your understanding of why it needs protecting,” he says. “You return home with a connection that a photograph or documentary rarely creates.” It is one of the enduring arguments for Antarctic tourism: experience can create advocates.
David Smyth, Founder of Forward Travel.
From visitor to advocate
Tudor Morgan, Antarctic ambassador for HX Expeditions, argues that direct experience can create a powerful connection with Antarctica and that operators have a responsibility to give that experience educational substance. HX has invested in onboard science and education facilities, including laboratories and museum-style exhibits. Drawing on research conducted with the University of Tasmania, it also offers a pre-departure online course covering wildlife, geopolitics and climate change, with opportunities for further university-level study.
“This approach helps transform tourism into an educational experience,” Morgan tells us, “and increased awareness often leads to stronger advocacy and positive environmental action, as people are more likely to protect what they value and understand.”
But the idea of the Antarctic tourist returning home as an environmental ambassador is attracting closer scrutiny. A 2026 systematic review of Antarctic ambassadorship found that its definition and measurement remain unclear, making it difficult to establish whether visiting the continent actually produces subsequent pro-environmental behaviour. Researchers have proposed a clearer framework that looks beyond feelings and intentions towards observable actions including sustainable living, environmental activism and political and societal engagement.
For environmental scientist, filmmaker and adventure storyteller Dr David Bossek, the distinction became apparent during his own Antarctic journey. One sentence from a marine biologist working as an expedition guide stayed with him: visitors may have arrived for different reasons, the guide told them, but they should return home as advocates for Antarctica’s protection. “That line carries both the best argument for Antarctic tourism and its biggest weakness,” Bossek tells us. “Being moved by a place is not the same as acting on its behalf once you’re home.”
“Being moved by a place is not the same as acting on its behalf once you’re home.”
At Neko Harbor, Bossek watched that contradiction play out on the ice. Among hundreds of Gentoo penguins, some visitors moved inside marked distances to get closer to the birds. Others stood across the pathways used by penguins moving between their colonies and the water, while travellers jostled for photographs beside an Antarctic flag when guides were looking elsewhere. “I went back to the ship with a strange, flattened feeling,” he recalls, after watching a place treated “like a backdrop”.
His experience leads him towards a broader conclusion. Travellers should choose responsible operators, understand the environmental cost of their journey and respect wildlife and site rules, but individual good intentions cannot carry the entire burden. Routes, group sizes, time ashore, guide-to-guest ratios, operator accountability and closures where necessary can make responsible behaviour part of the structure rather than something dependent upon individual restraint. Antarctic visitor guidelines already impose substantial controls. No more than 100 passengers from a vessel may generally be ashore at once, with a guide-to-passenger ratio of at least 1:20 during landings, while site-specific guidelines can impose tighter restrictions. Yet the larger question remains: how much tourism can Antarctica accommodate?
Tudor Morgan, Antarctic ambassador for HX Expeditions.
Dr David Bossek at Neko Harbor.
Gentoo Penguins on Petermann Island on the Antarctic Peninsula. Photographer: Sam Edmonds | iStock.
The question of limits
Bossek argues for a scientifically grounded visitor cap, independent monitoring and mandatory conservation funding from operators, saying the benefits attributed to tourism should be demonstrated and weighed against emissions, wildlife disturbance and biosecurity risk. Morgan disagrees that a strict numerical cap is the best answer. “A strict numerical cap would be a blunt tool and not the most effective way to manage tourism because it does not account for environmental conditions or the vast scale of Antarctica,” he says.
He points instead to site-specific management and the development of broader spatial approaches where groups of landing sites experience concentrated activity. Existing rules restrict landings to vessels carrying no more than 500 passengers and generally allow no more than 100 passengers ashore at one time. Individual sites can also be subject to limits on vessel visits and other operating requirements.
Morgan also argues that some projections for future Antarctic tourism overstate its likely scale. Fly-cruise journeys are becoming increasingly attractive, particularly for travellers seeking shorter itineraries, but aircraft capacity, limited runway infrastructure, operating costs and unpredictable Antarctic weather impose practical constraints.
Underlying the disagreement over caps is a more fundamental question about where responsibility should sit. Morgan points to the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators’ (IAATO) mechanisms for monitoring its members, including observer inspections, operational reviews, complaints procedures and potential sanctions. He acknowledges that a small number of operators visit Antarctica without IAATO membership, while noting that operators remain subject to the Antarctic Treaty System and permitting requirements imposed by their national authorities. Bossek’s experience raises a different aspect of the same problem: even carefully constructed rules depend upon compliance once visitors reach the ice. Responsibility therefore stretches across a chain – from traveller to guide, operator, industry body, government and ultimately the international system responsible for Antarctica.
Huge blocks of glacier ice are in the process of calving off into the ocean. Photographer: Victor Ward | iStock.
Deciding to leave
There is another perspective in this debate, however, and it comes from people who decided that working responsibly within Antarctic tourism was no longer enough. New research published in the Annals of Tourism Research (Sokolíčková, Z., et al., 2026) examines the experiences of 25 former Antarctic tour guides who chose to leave the industry after grappling with the environmental and personal contradictions of their work.
Researchers Zdenka Sokolíčková, Elizabeth Cooper and Christy Hehir found that quitting was rarely a simple or sudden decision. Instead, the guides underwent what the researchers describe as a gradual process of moral negotiation, moving between recognising a problem, identifying a possible response, deciding whether to act and ultimately changing their behaviour. Their conclusions challenge one of the assumptions underlying much of the discussion about responsible tourism: that caring for a vulnerable place necessarily means finding better ways to remain engaged with it. For these former guides, withdrawal itself became an environmental action.
The conflict could become particularly stark when guides and visitors experienced the same Antarctic event very differently. One former guide recalled watching enormous sections of glacier calve into the water. While passengers cheered at the spectacle, the guide felt like crying: “You’d see massive glacier calvings, and you’d just want to cry. But all the guests would be cheering. And you’d be like … ‘can you not put two and two together?’”
“You’d see massive glacier calvings, and you’d just want to cry. But all the guests would be cheering. And you’d be like … ‘can you not put two and two together?’”
The researchers describe quitting Antarctic tourism as a high-impact pro-environmental behaviour and conclude that environmental care can include choosing to stop participating. Their interviews also reveal the considerable personal complexity of that choice. Moral negotiation was gradual, painful and non-linear; leaving work, colleagues and a place to which the guides felt deeply attached did not necessarily end the conflict.
The study does not represent Antarctic guides generally. Its participants were specifically people who had left the industry, and their experiences cannot establish that Antarctic tourism itself should cease. They do, however, introduce a more confronting possibility into the discussion. Responsible tourism usually asks how an activity can be improved. These former guides eventually asked whether their responsible choice was to stop participating in it.
That question becomes particularly significant when placed beside the argument for Antarctic ambassadorship. If visiting Antarctica creates environmental advocates, tourism potentially contributes something extending far beyond the journey itself. If that advocacy cannot be demonstrated, the balance becomes harder to calculate. Bossek puts the burden of proof firmly on tourism. “Antarctica shouldn’t have to prove that tourism is worth it. Tourism should have to prove it isn’t doing harm.”
Photographer: Frans Van Heerden | iStock.
How much is enough?
There is no simple calculation capable of balancing a traveller’s transformed understanding of Antarctica against the emissions required to take them there, or conservation funding against disturbance at a wildlife colony. Nor does every visitor, voyage or landing impose an identical cost. That makes the question of limits considerably more complicated than choosing between access and prohibition.
Smyth argues that responsibility must be shared between travellers, operators, governments and communities. He also draws an important distinction between the ability to reach somewhere and the justification for doing so. “Not everyone needs to be everywhere, and not every place needs to be made more accessible,” he says. “The travel industry also must be prepared to say that just because we can take people somewhere doesn’t automatically mean we should.”
Perhaps that is where the discussion about vulnerable environments becomes most useful. The question is no longer confined to whether travellers behave responsibly once they arrive. It extends to how many people arrive, where they go, how frequently they visit, how operators manage them, what protection governments require, what measurable benefit tourism creates and whether some places or circumstances demand greater restraint.
Experiencing an extraordinary place can create knowledge, connection and a determination to protect it. Tourism can provide resources and attention that contribute to conservation. Carefully managed access can give people an understanding of environments that would otherwise remain distant and abstract. Those benefits carry weight, and so do the costs. The difficult task is to demonstrate whether the benefits justify those costs – and to recognise when the balance changes.
The most important question facing Antarctica and the world’s other vulnerable environments may ultimately be less about whether we love them. It is what that love requires of us.
Sources
Sokolíčková, Z., Cooper, E., and Hehir, C. (2026). Mind the gaps: The moral journey of tour guides who quit. Annals of Tourism Research, 120.
Saila Kumar, S., van Valkengoed, A. M., and Steg, L. (2026). Redefining ‘Antarctic ambassadorship’: a systematic review and conceptual clarification. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 1(25).
International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators. (2026). Antarctic tourism regulations and visitor guidelines.