Currents Summer 2024 (1) - Flipbook - Page 7
OVER 100 TOUR COMPANIES NOW RUN WITHIN THE SOUTHERN
HEMISPHERE’S SUMMER MONTHS BETWEEN NOVEMBER AND MARCH AND
MORE THAN 100,000 TOURISTS WILL MAKE THEIR WAY TO ANTARCTICA.
As leisure travel to the white continent grows exponentially, visitors are lured by
profit-minded tour companies whose practices counteract their professed
environmentalism.
Dark water laps against a narrow passageway of rockface hidden by snow. Blue ice glows beneath
the ocean9s surface. A pod of orcas use the frozen corridor as their hunting ground, searching for
seals and penguins.
On the deck of the 90-passenger tourist vessel, brightly-bundled bodies photograph their
surroundings on a late-November day. Their exclamations float on clouds of warm breath, the
landscape of the Antarctic Peninsula blurring past.
Overhead, gray storm clouds loom, casting unseasonable snowfall in all directions. Tourists do not
seem to notice as the flakes collect on their gloves. Inside, the ship9s crew members find the
precipitation worrying: in hushed tones and side-conversations, they mutter how strange it is to see
snow storms so late in the spring. During the formally-scheduled cruise programming, however,
these guides – who hold advanced degrees in environmental sciences and whose work ships them
to the Antarctic Peninsula dozens of times a year – will choose not to mention the anomaly. Instead,
they will focus on the narrative they are expected to tell about the pristine white continent, remote
and relatively untouched by human influence. They will omit such incongruities as unseasonable
spring weather, which they know is likely a symptom of larger climatic changes to precipitation
patterns in the region.
8
