Pristine Antarctica: the final frontier of modern wilderness tourism
“But, after all, it is not what we see that inspires awe, but the knowledge of what lies beyond our view. We see only a few miles of ruffled snow bounded by a vague wavy horizon, but we know that beyond that horizon are hundreds and even thousands of miles which can offer no change to the weary eye, while on the vast expanse that one’s mind conceives one knows there is neither tree nor shrub, nor any living thing, nor even inanimate rock — nothing but this terrible limitless expanse of snow. It has been so for countless years, and it will be so for countless more. And we, little human insects, have started to crawl over this awful desert, and are now bent on crawling back again. Could anything be more terrible than this silent, wind-swept immensity when one thinks such thoughts?” — From the diary of Robert Falcon Scott, written before turning back to end an expedition that took his party 320 kilometres onto the plateau
Aside from killer whales, if there is one thing I regret having been unable to see on this trip, it is the above. The ice sheet that covers 96 percent of the surface of Antarctica is so massive as to literally press the continent into the Earth; it averages 1.6 kilometres in thickness, making up 70 percent of all the world’s freshwater and 90 percent of its ice. Our expedition touched down on its friendliest shores on the Peninsula, never seeing the great frozen plateau. One tiny scion of this desolate world floated by us in the form of a brutally rectangular iceberg, maybe 400 metres square, which towered over our ship and touched bottom another 270 metres underwater. In comparison, the white wastes that Scott and the other adventurers of the “Heroic Age” trekked across are still unfathomable. It boggles the mind to imagine a continent two-thirds the size of North America which stands so astoundingly bare.
The ancient Greeks initially supposed the existence of a southern continent as a balance against the large size of the world’s northern lands, and this idea, perhaps because of its pleasing symmetry, was taken for fact long afterward. The Terra Australis Incognita on medieval maps was finally confirmed to exist, and then explored, only in the last couple of centuries; because it is so inhospitable and unprofitable, this last frontier was probed slowly and haltingly. After the southern ocean’s exploitation by sealers and whalers became both unprofitable and unpopular, this land began to be used almost exclusively for research. Anthony Brandt described it as “by default, the most intellectual of the Earth’s landmasses” in his 2004 book The South Pole: A Historical Reader: it resists all human uses but the pursuit of curiosity. We surely have that fact to thank for the great success of the Antarctic Treaty of 1959, which froze all territorial claims and declared the continent “a natural reserve, devoted to peace and science.”
But the population of scientists here is only about 4,000 at its summertime peak. Far more numerous are the tourists who visit each year: their numbers have steadily grown, peaking in the 2007–08 season at 46,000 (and probably having fallen in the last couple of years because of recession). The management of tourism here is also largely a success story so far. Despite the fact that its membership is voluntary, the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators oversees 90 percent of touristic activity in Antarctica. Its strict environmental guidelines follow and expand on recommendations set by the Antarctic Treaty; they have maintained those friendly, oft-visited parts of the continent that we saw in a remarkably pristine state. Students On Ice is a member organization (which cares deeply about preserving the continent regardless), so we dutifully scrubbed our boots before making landfall, were forbidden from bringing food ashore or taking back anything whatsoever, and were advised at every landing on how to avoid disturbing the wildlife. IAATO requires its members to submit environmental impact assessments for the trips they run, and altogether bans onshore landings from large cruise ships or any landing of more than 100 people.
With regulations like this, IAATO helps preserve not only the environment, but also the tourist’s experience of it. We never saw other visitors on shore, and only occasionally glimpsed another ship; this is in part thanks to a shared scheduling system through which visiting ships “reserve” their destination at a given date and time. When we visited Port Lockroy — once a little island outpost of the British, now a museum and gift shop complete with postbox for sending Antarctic postcards — it was surprising to hear that the staff receive a shipload of visitors about every day. There’s still far less visitation here than at many nature reserves, but our landings would have felt rather different if we had to share the spaces with others, or even encountered their boats leaving as ours arrived. In the essay I quoted earlier in this series, Jonathan Franzen writes about how solitary natural experiences are a way for him of revisiting his “childhood fantasies of being a Special Adventurer,” fostered by authors like Tolkien and Lewis — but this doesn’t fit well with the fact that other people are around, adventuring just as specially: i.e., “Frodo Baggins and his compatriots never had to share campgrounds with forty-five identical Fellowships of the Ring wearing Gore-Tex parkas from REI.”
It’s a strange tension inherent in modern wilderness tourism, but the grooming of the touristic experience in Antarctica doesn’t render that experience “fake.” Any landscape we could transform and don’t is, in a sense, already a product of human artifice. We are in large part the makers of our environments now, and it is all for the better if we choose to keep them healthy, even pristine — especially if visitors take more meaning from this pristine experience, and are perhaps even driven to environmental action by it in a way they never would have been by the penguin pen at a crowded zoo. IAATO, and Students On Ice, see tourism as an essential branch of conservation advocacy, a way of showing people how beautiful a really well-conserved space can be. So why not let us get some time alone with it when we come to see it, and save the land from the stresses of serial boat landings to boot?
But maybe this unease with other people is the reason that the thought of that ever-untamed Antarctic plateau has such appeal. It’s touched by us only indirectly; it’s friendly to nothing whatsoever. Aside from the continent’s scattered research bases, it remains a true no-person’s-land, an eternal frontier that we’re likely never to colonize, nor even to spend much time visiting. It remains, as ever, vast and otherworldly, about as unyielding a piece of nature as there can be.
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