By: Jeffrey Henry
Submitted: 2010-09-10 12:19:26 | Word Count: 742
Hardy types will still venture to Antarctica despite its unfriendly ice, snow, isolation, high winds and raging seas and around 11,200 tourists will be surging in, with all except for a hundred and thirty of them this tourist season, coming in via cruise ships. With a growth of 400 compared to last year's tourists proving to not be very impressive with the tourist season that runs from the middle of November up to February, the fact is that this is actually a 70 percent jump compared to the 6,585 tourist seasons that came before it. Most watchers of Antarctica are worried about its environmental state and warns that there could be more visitors wanting to come in.
An Antarctic cruise can easily reach $20,000 just for a single traveler as the average 14-day cruise is a still hefty $6,000 to $7,000, plus the traveler will have to purchase a round trip ticket to where 90 percent of the trips depart, in Ushuaia, Argentina in Tierra del Fuego. Underneath the invincible mask of Antarctica, it is not insulated from the growing number of travelers, despite the cost of going there as well as its merciless climate and geography, so nature experts today maintain that super saturation of tourists leads to formidable threats to their environment.
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The one director behind the Antarctic Project maintains that restrictions on the annual number of visitors along with banning new site explorations should be done even as Antarctica should be set for all the world to behold due to its breathtaking beauty. Spanning 40 different countries and with a membership of 40 countries, this Washington based project is the according secretariat. Amid the fact that most of Antarctic visitors come back committed to strive for the conservation of this land, so many have become dangerously obsessed and oftentimes, too many flood this fragile frozen continent.
A concern greatly nagging this director is the great number of tourists heading to the exact same areas along the 800 mile Antarctic Peninsula, which is home to the most formidable concentration of penguins, seals and birds so he is keen on the six thousand voyager limit per year. But tourist groups going over 100 people is a rarity, especially those that set foot on land. Animals are barely able to get food for themselves or for their young much more getting some rests, when there are visitors.
Even science is uncertain if there will be a long term repercussion, she avers. Some of the fears include tourists touching flora and throwing garbage recklessly. With the many systems patterned after the Antarctic Treaty, staff make sure that when visitors arrive, they do not create much impact to their environment, and it is good that most tour operators strictly espouse and abide by these. To protect the environment, the series of efforts such as the Antarctic Treaty of 1959, ratified by 43 different countries, along with the environmental protocol signed last January 14, 1998 put an end to the various oil explorations and mining operations and even went into promoting environmental safeguards like limiting the fishing sprees along with lessening cruises around the Antarctic.
Zodiacs, tiny motorized rubber boats are utilized by members of the tour association now based in New York who voluntarily adopted the 100 person limit for the cause of caring for the shore. Nine Russian flags are flown by the vessels out of 15 of them this season. With the Soviet Union's break up, an opportunity for tour operators came as several small ships have been made available. An average of 40 to 80 people are welcome aboard these ships, several vessels along one that is know to be an ice breaker, all of them being able to plow through ice with hardened hulls. But meanwhile, environmental concerns are plaguing the White Continent. It would be possible that in the future, we all would look back and with relief say, no problem, we just grew concerned about it when there was no need to. But even as we are raring to visit this beautiful continent, let us restrain ourselves until science brings the answers.
