This coming tourists season, Antarctica will be welcoming about 11,200 tourists and all of them except for 130 travelers, coming in via cruise liners, proof enough that this continent's harsh conditions such as isolation, snow, ice, high winds and raging seas are not enough to ward off the tourists. Even with this year's visitors only more by 400 compared to last year, tourist season, which runs from the middle of November and through February, still has never experienced a 70 percent growth during the 6,585 seasons prior to this year's season. The environment of Antarctica is a cause of concern for many watchers who predict that a thousand more Antarctic voyagers will keep coming in year by year.
It would cost a traveler about $20,000 for a cruise, as a two week leisure cruise will cost him a hefty six to seven thousand dollars, but it does not end there for he will still have to pay a round trip flight ticket as he will have to come from Tierra del Fuego in Ushuaia Argentina, which is known as the area where 90 percent of tourists start. 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.
The man behind the Antarctic Project notes that even as he wants all the world to see the Antarctic region's breathtaking scenery, capping tourists coming in and limiting new sites explorations is a must. This Washington founded project works as the secretariat for over 200 environmental groups throughout forty different countries. Amid the fact that most of Antarctic visitors come back committeeed to strive for the conservation of this land, so many have become dangerously obsessed and oftentimes, too many flood this fragile frozen continent.
A major concern of this director, who favors a limit of 6,000 visitors a year, is that most tourists visit the same few places on the 800 mile long Antarctic Peninsula, which has the continent's biggest concentration of penguins, seals and birds. Even as tour groups arriving there do not even exceed a hundred at one occasion. It is sad that animals are bothered as they rest, and neither can they get some food for their babies or for their own selves, so this is very harmful.
She notes further that Science cannot say yet if a long term impact will arise from this. Tourists touching the plants and leaving garbage behind are among the growing concerns. By reinforcing the Antarctic Treaty, we understand why when travelers go ashore, large and experienced staffs make sure they have very little impact if none at all, and this also sheds light as to why most tour operators abide by such environmental guidelines. The Antarctic Treaty of 1959, ratified after the signature of 43 different countries, on top of the environmental protocol signed last January 14, 1998 ended the oil explorations and mining operations as well as ventured into environmental safeguards from fishing limits up to Antarctic cruises on various seasons.
The tour association, based in New York City saw that their members adhered to the 100 person limit for shore tours, and this also called for the use of zodiacs, motorized rubber vessels. We shall see 9 out of 15 Antarctic vessels raging in the skies with Russian flags. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, an opportunity for tour operators rose as several small sea vessels became available for them. An average of 40 to 80 people are welcome aboard these ships, several vessels along one that is known to be an ice breaker, all of them being able to plow through ice with hardened hulls. Meanwhile, the growing concern toward the environment of Antarctica, though, is extremely evident. The ideal scenario would be us, looking back heaving a sigh of relief that all our worries went down the drain as there was nothing to be worried about in the first place. But even as we are raring to visit this beautiful continent, let us restrain ourselves until science brings the answers.
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