Currents Summer 2024 (1) - Flipbook - Page 8
Feet on the snow
The 90 passengers cruising through the Gerlache Strait are just a trickle of what is to come.
During the 2022-2023 season, which spans the Southern Hemisphere9s summer months
between November and March, more than 100,000 tourists will make their way to Antarctica.
While non-researchers have traveled to the Antarctic continent since the 1950s, the tourism
industry did not operate in earnest until the nineties. In its infancy, Antarctic tourism was
modest in scale: during the entire decade of the fifties, just three trips visited the region,
carrying a total of 456 passengers. The industry has expanded considerably since then,
enough to prompt the New York Times to write in 2020 that the destination is
