Currents Summer 2024 (1) - Flipbook - Page 9
These stations are just two of the 87 in operation across the continent. 43 of these bases are
full-season, meaning they host people who winter-over during the long polar night. Other
stations, like Brown Base, are open only during the summer, the same season that tourists
trek to the continent. Currently, 33 countries have claim to one or more bases in Antarctica.
This list includes the 12 original signatories of the Antarctic Treaty as well as India, Ukraine,
China and Brazil, to name a few. Under the articles of the Treaty, each base is required to
open its doors to inspection by any other nationality with a base in Antarctica, at any time.
Before the Covid-19 pandemic, many bases located along tourist routes also opened their
doors to non-scientific visitors.
As international leisure travel has resumed after the pandemic, the south polar region has
piqued visitors9 interest. Antarctic tourism is growing exponentially. It is expected to continue
to do so in the coming years, as numbers of tourists far exceeded pre-pandemic levels
during the 2022-2023 season. The IAATO reported 103,988 visitors to Antarctica during that
period, marking a nearly 100% increase from the 55,489 ticket-holders before the pandemic
in the 2018-2019 season.
Amplification of Antarctic proportions
Antarctic tourism converges upon a conspicuous fact about the southern polar region: it
experiences climate change at a faster rate than many other parts of the planet. It is against
this backdrop that visitors arrive, while the industry they support maintains loosely-enforced
regulations and aversion to climate change conversations deemed too 8political9.
The politics in vogue, of course, exert little influence over basic science principles or the
planet9s system dynamics. Albedo is one such scientific phenomenon. It explains why the
poles warm faster than regions at lower latitudes. Just as wearing a white shirt in the
summer is cooler than wearing a black one, white surfaces tend to remain cooler than dark
ones. As warm greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere cause snow and ice melt in Antarctica,
they induce a positive feedback loop in the polar region. White snow and ice diminish to
reveal ocean and rocks, changing the surface albedo from high to low. Heat from the sun is
then absorbed by those dark-colored surfaces with low albedo, instead of being reflected
back to space by snow. The more these light-colored layers melt in the region, the more heat
is absorbed, amplifying warming trends and setting off subsequent melting.
Recent research demonstrates that Antarctica feels the effects of more localized trends in
addition to global ones. This includes the impacts of tourism.
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