You Can Visit All Seven Continents. But Should You?

Executive Producer: Tom Grahsler
Senior Producer: Michael Olcott
Producer: Michaela Winberg
Associate Producer: Bibiana Correa
Editor: Meg Driscoll
Original Music: Catherine Anderson
Mixing and Sound Design: Emma Munger
Engineers: Al Banks, Charlie Kaier, Diana Martinez
Tile Art: Nick Rogacki

Peak Travel is a production of WHYY, distributed by PRX, and part of the NPR podcast network.

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[MUSIC]

[SOUND UP FROM YOUTUBE VIDEO BY KARL WATSON, CHEERING]

TARIRO MZEZEWA, HOST: When most people do a polar plunge, they don’t mean the word polar literally. They’re usually dunking into an ice bath or running into the Atlantic in the winter.

[SOUND OF SPLASHING INTO WATER, KARL AND FRIENDS LAUGHING]

But last year, when Karl Watson jumped from the gangway of a cruise ship on his 40th birthday, it really was a polar plunge.

[SOUND UP FROM YOUTUBE VIDEO BY KARL WATSON]

FRIEND: How was it?

KARL WATSON: It is [bleep] freezing!

TM: He was off the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, and the water was below freezing.

KW: It’s like in Titanic, it’s a thousand daggers stabbing you right in the face. [Laughter]

TM: Karl has a YouTube channel where he documents all of his trips — to places like Taiwan, Switzerland, Pakistan, and Egypt. This trip was on his bucket list for a long time.

KW: Antarctica has this draw to it because it’s, like, this mystical, kind of untouched place, and it was the last continent for me to visit as well. So I’m not one for ticking things off lists, but it kind of has that nice, kind of, you know, nice edge to it, saying you’ve got all seven.

TM: Karl is one of a growing number of tourists who have visited Antarctica in the last few years. A record-breaking 100,000 tourists made the trip in the 2023 season. Many of them go because they want to check it off their “bucket list” — they want to be able to say they’ve visited all seven continents. And when they do, visitors say the experience is wondrous. Otherworldly. Once in a lifetime.

KW: There’ll be, like, some mist on the seas, so some of the mountains in the distance look like a matte painting from, like, a 1980s movie, because it didn’t look quite real. And you’re just going, like, you’re almost just blinking a lot, going, “Am I actually seeing this?”

TM: But others have a fundamental question about Antarctica: Should tourists go there at all?

[THEME MUSIC]

It’s originally uninhabited by humans and still largely untouched. Anyone going there risks harming wildlife that has never interacted with humans before. Plus, there’s the carbon footprint of visiting. One trip there generates roughly the same amount of emissions that the average person produces in an entire year.

From WHYY, this is Peak Travel. I’m Tariro Mzezewa. In this episode, we’re talking about Antarctic tourism. What is the system that governs tourism to the massive, icy continent? And just because we can visit, does it mean we should?

[MIDROLL BREAK]

If you want to visit Antarctica for fun, how do you even get there? It’s not like you can just call an Uber to JFK and board a direct flight. The journey is long and difficult.

For Karl, who lives in Winnipeg, Canada, the trip began with a flight down to Ushuaia, a port city at the very bottom of Argentina. From there, he boarded a cruise ship.

[SOUND UP FROM YOUTUBE VIDEO BY KARL WATSON]

KW: This afternoon is when we’re boarding. It’s starting to sink in, now that the ship is actually here. It’s starting to feel a bit real…

TM: That kicked off a perilous two-day trip. Ships have to sail across the Drake Passage, a famously turbulent body of water that makes many passengers seasick.

[SOUND OF WIND RACING]

KW: Well, good morning from the Drake Passage. We started feeling the waves during the night, so I was like, “Oh, here we go; we must be in the storm now…”

There was one point on the second night where we hit a really big wave at a bad angle. So we were like, my wife and I were asleep in bed, and suddenly just got chucked out of our bed.

TM: If you’re brave enough to withstand the rolling seas, you’ll wake up to this announcement.

CRUISE SHIP STAFF OVER LOUDSPEAKER: We have crossed the polar front, or the Antarctic convergence, and this means that we are biologically now in Antarctica.

[SOUND OF WAVES CRASHING]

KW: Woke up in the morning, opened up the curtain, and then it was just suddenly there in front of us, like nothing could prepare you for how awesome the scale is. And so everyone’s just blown away, and everyone went outside on the deck and was taking pictures, but mostly just kind of standing there, stunned.

[MUSIC]

TM: Most people who visit go to an area called the Antarctic Peninsula. It’s been the main attraction ever since Antarctica became a tourist destination back in the 1950s, when just a few hundred passengers boarded a ship to the continent for the first time.

Now, about 75% of people visit by cruise ship. And since there’s not much infrastructure on the continent, they spend most of their time on the ship — eating and sleeping on board.

Most tourism to Antarctica happens between November and March. That’s the summer there, when temperatures reach a balmy 30 degrees Fahrenheit. Climate change has made the trip even easier, with melting sea ice extending the cruising season.

When tourists arrive, they usually start by boarding a Zodiac, a tiny motor boat with an inflatable deck, to sail around the shore. Then they get to go on excursions, like hiking in the snow and visiting with penguins.

But before they could go anywhere, Karl and his friends had to follow some rules.

KW: They do sanitize everything that you’re wearing. So every time you got on and off the boat, you had to step in this water with like sanitizer in it. So it would clean your boots getting on and off the boat every time, so you wouldn’t bring any diseases onto the mainland and wouldn’t take any of them back off with you. Once you’re actually on the land, they only allow a certain amount of people on land at a time, and you have to sort of follow this exact kind of single file route following these flags.

TM: Then, with a tour guide at the wheel, Karl and the other passengers sailed around the shore, taking in massive icebergs and wildlife unlike they’d seen anywhere else in the world.

[SOUND UP FROM YOUTUBE VIDEO BY KARL WATSON]

TOUR GUIDE: … So, right in front of us, and you can see a tail!

TM: Then they got lucky.

KW: We’re drifting around, and we just spotted a humpback whale. Nearly caught it on camera. Hopefully, he’s not being too shy. [Laughter]

TOUR GUIDE: I think you guys are pretty happy?

KW: Yeah! Gold star mate.

[SOUND OF GROUP CHEERING]

FRIEND: We can go home now. [Laughter]

KW: You can tell this is a place not designed for humans.

[MUSIC]

TM: And because the trip to the continent is so long, it isn’t cheap.

ELLE LEANE: It is expensive to travel to Antarctica. Certainly it’s limited to people who are comfortably off.

TM: That’s Elle Leane. She’s a professor of Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania in Australia. She explained that, depending on the level of luxury, a trip can cost anywhere from $5,000 to more than $100,000 per person.

After studying the continent’s tourism industry, Elle is starting to worry about the huge number of people who visit each year — and what impact they leave. Some of the newer activities give her pause.

EL: More and more, we’re seeing things like helicopter rides. We’re seeing submersibles. We’re seeing scuba diving. You know, so there has to be decisions made about which ones of these things are more environmentally friendly, which ones produce a more meaningful experience, which ones are just about sort of doing high-octane activities in Antarctica because it’s glamorous, like, anything that talks about seventh-continent-collecting or bucket-listing and so forth.

TM: Elle pointed to the increasing number of events people are hosting there. Ten years ago, the heavy metal band Metallica wanted to be the first to perform a show on all seven continents. So they played a concert called “Freeze ‘Em All” — and teamed up with Coca-Cola for a sweepstakes to bring 120 people to watch.

[SOUND UP FROM “FREEZE ‘EM ALL” CONCERT]

EL: Yeah, I’m not a huge fan of these one-off events, like the marathons and so forth, where you could be doing it anywhere. A Metallica concert, it’s not really about Antarctica, that’s about Metallica, right? [Laughter]

TM: You might think there would be some kind of rule against this. But it isn’t that simple.

ONA HAHS: I am Ona Hahs. I am the State Department’s senior Antarctic official.

TM: Ona represents the U.S. government in what’s called the Antarctic Treaty.

Since no one really lives there other than scientists doing research, it doesn’t have its own government and laws. There are two groups who help to set the rules. The first one is the Antarctic Treaty. It’s a kind of committee of nations that governs it.

In Ona’s humble opinion…

OH: The Antarctic Treaty is the best story in diplomacy.

TM: This story starts back in the 1950s.

OH: Basically, in the middle of the century, you had seven countries that had territorial claims to parts of Antarctica. And there was all of this tension among all of these folks.

TM: But instead of fighting over the land, these countries decided to — and this is the official term — freeze their claims to Antarctica. All of them would govern it together.

OH: And so that’s what we did. It’s essentially a peace treaty.

TM: And it’s been that way ever since.

[SOUND UP FROM NEWSCAST]

NEWSCASTER: Today, the flags that fly there come from nations all around the world, brought together in a cooperative spirit of peace and science.

TM: The Treaty set some new, pretty progressive rules.

[MUSIC]

It passed a sweeping ban on commercial mining, regulations on waste management and marine pollution, and requirements for all vessels to conduct environmental impact assessments before they visit. But many people have pointed out that there are some problems with the system. For one, they only meet once a year for just two weeks.

OH: And then the decisions, as I said, they have to be by consensus.

TM: The Antarctic Treaty now has a hard time getting new regulations passed. That’s because, like Ona said, all decisions have to be made by full consensus of all 29 governing countries. So if just one country doesn’t want to implement a certain policy, the whole thing gets thrown out. Just last year, China blocked a measure to acknowledge the emperor penguin as a specially protected species… for the third year in a row.

It’s also hard because even if the regulation does pass through the Treaty system, then each country has to go home and pass that law in their domestic government, too. If they don’t, they can’t actually enforce the rule legally.

Here’s an example: The only regulation the Treaty system has ever passed on tourism specifically was in 2009, when it ruled that a ship with more than 500 people can’t dock on Antarctica.

But the U.S. Congress never passed that rule.

OH: Let’s say you had a cruise ship with 501 people, and they went to have them land on the ice. You know, we couldn’t take easy legal action against that company, even if it were an American company, because that is not a rule that we have put into our domestic legal system.

TM: That leaves big gaps in the system. And this is where the second main group overseeing Antarctica comes in.

LISA KELLEY: My name is Lisa Kelley, and I am the director of operations and government affairs for IAATO.

TM: IAATO stands for the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators.

It’s a private organization that sets rules for tour companies and then gives its stamp of approval to the operators who follow them. It’s kinda like if you get coffee, and it’s certified organic. The label lets you know which companies are more environmentally friendly.

IAATO is the organization that makes sure the tour group Karl is traveling with sanitizes their boots and stays away from wildlife. And most people in the industry agree that IAATO’s rules are good. They fill in the gaps where the Treaty system falls short.

But unlike the Treaty group, IAATO is not a government entity. So the rules aren’t legally enforceable. Inevitably, that means some violations end up slipping through the cracks.

LK: Where we need assistance in a lot of cases is with looking at bad actors. There are those who come down to Antarctica and perhaps aren’t behaving in the best, perhaps they’re being too close to wildlife, even picking up wildlife. And we have asked treaty parties in the past to find a way to put sanctions or to address that.

[MUSIC]

TM: If a tour company breaks the rules, IAATO can revoke its membership. It can try to get a government body to intervene. But that’s about it. And you’d be surprised what some people try to bring with them.

LK: So, for instance, a few years ago there was a chicken on a sailboat as a pet. And it was a pet. However, there are some very, very strict guidelines about obviously introduced species, but especially poultry.

TM: Bringing any new species to Antarctica risks bringing new diseases to the continent. Especially a chicken. There’s currently an outbreak of bird flu, which threatens the entire penguin population.

[SOUND UP FROM NEWSCAST]

NEWSCASTER: … Samples confirmed the worst. The deadly new strain of bird flu had reached Antarctica, the world’s most remote continent.

INTERVIEWEE: It’s quite devastating. Every couple of meters, you’re finding another dead bird.

TM: When it comes to violations like these, enforcement falls in the lap of someone like Kara Weller.

KARA WELLER: The rules are enforced by us, by the expedition team. So you know, we’re not just guides where, well, we don’t like to call ourselves policemen, but we present the rules at the beginning of a voyage and just make sure that people understand them.

TM: Kara is a tour guide with Seabourn Cruises. And she tries to make sure tourists on her trips do the right thing.

KW: For the most part, people are really respectful because, yeah, Antarctica, it’s a beautiful place, and it does really get to almost everybody who visits.

[MUSIC]

TM: But is that enough?

OH: You could argue that it would be better if these things were truly legally binding. Sure. Absolutely.

TM: That’s Ona again, from the State Department.

OH: Is it ideal, is it perfect, are there, you know, is it gap free? No, of course it’s not. There’s nothing in life that is. But there’s a lot of protections out there, such that I feel comfortable with the idea that there is tourism going on even while we stop and keep thinking about, ‘What are the gaps?”

TM: There might be new rules on tourism soon. The Antarctic Treaty members are currently accepting proposals for a new tourism framework, which could set rules that are actually enforceable for the industry. The earliest that experts anticipate the parties might reach consensus is in 2028.

Many are afraid that we don’t have that time to waste. More on that after the break.

[MIDROLL BREAK]

[SOUND OF PENGUINS CHIRPING]

[MUSIC]

MARILYN RAPHAEL: The first time I saw Antarctica, it was from the air/ When we were coming in to land, and I was glued to the window.

[SOUND OF AIRPLANE LANDING]

TM: Marilyn Raphael is a scientist at UCLA, where she researches climate change in the Antarctic region. She visited back in 2011 for her research.

MR: It was just, it was so big, and it was so white. It’s just, I had never seen anything like it. I think I had a grin fixed on my face for the whole seven days or so that we were there. It’s beautiful. It really is. I kind of love it, and then I don’t want anybody else to go so they can stay that way.

TM: Marilyn studies the sea ice that surrounds Antarctica. It grows and shrinks with the seasons, and helps maintain ocean temperatures all over the world. It also provides a habitat for animals.

MR: This is where the penguins breed, and penguins aren’t the only animals that use, you know, here are the seals, and then even beneath the ice itself, the fish.

[SOUND OF SEALS CALLING, WATER FLOWING]

TM: Lately, her research has been pretty grim.

MR: About 2023, for all of that year, we had record low sea ice extent, and that actually continued into 2024. That change overwhelms all the things that I have seen in doing sea ice research over the last couple of decades. So it’s almost like we stepped off a cliff.

[MUSIC]

TM: And although Antarctica is far away, the effects of melting sea ice are global.

MR: Florida will change. Already in Louisiana, we have climate refugees because of the change in water levels. So it’s going to be everywhere.

TM: Marilyn says Antarctic tourism is part of the problem.

MR: So it’s a fragile environment, and tourism in fragile environments is fraught with problems. We risk introducing non-native species. There’s a problem with managing the waste that comes with tourism. It’s inevitable. You can be as careful as you want. Once you set foot on land or in the water around, we bring those problems.

TM: She’s especially worried because people on vacation aren’t always the most mindful. And any small action by a tourist can be really harmful.

MR: I have been a tourist in other places, and I’ve seen other tourists. I know what we do. [Laughter] Even when we’re careful, I know what we do. Only one in a hundred people will drop a small piece of paper on the ground and not pick it back up. Ten thousand people pass through. Do you know how many bits of paper that is?

TM: Even as a scientist who researches Antarctica, Marilyn has sworn off going back. Instead, she does her work by observing satellite images of sea ice. She just can’t bear the idea of her presence threatening the continent further.

MR: If we want that Antarctica that we have now to remain as it is, then we have to exert more control on tourism.

PILOT OVER LOUDSPEAKER: We are eight minutes from our scheduled flight to Antarctica. It will take us five hours and 20 minutes…

JEB BROOKS: Why did I want to visit the South Pole? Because it’s there.

TM: Jeb Brooks visited in early 2023. But he didn’t take the trip that most tourists do. Instead of cruising to the Antarctic Peninsula, he flew to the much more remote South Pole from Cape Town. Like Karl, Jeb also vlogged his trip on his travel YouTube channel.

[SOUND UP FROM YOUTUBE VIDEO BY JEB BROOKS]

JB: Hello jetsetters, I’m Jeb Brooks from GreenerGrass.com. Welcome to Antarctica.

TM: Jeb says the trip is impossible to describe. He camped there — staying in a big, dome-shaped tent with his own bed, dinner table, and bathroom.

JB: We’re, you know, at 83 degrees south, so the sun never set. And, you know, you know, so it was a bit of a challenge to sleep. But we made it work. And the food we were eating was, well, it was canned tomato soup. I mean, you know, we weren’t having fine dining, you know, at that remote place. But I think that, again, was, just, an incredible, sort of, channeling of the explorers of the early 20th century who did that day in and day out in order to reach that place.

TM: His favorite part, by far, was seeing the penguins.

[SOUND OF PENGUINS CHIRPING]

JB: We had the chance to visit an emperor penguin colony, which was pretty amazing. And they are, this particular colony is not used to having people at all. It’s, you know, really an unvisited colony, and so the penguins are naturally very curious. They think we are parents with food, and would tend to come up to us in a way that others, you know, may not.

TM: Jeb went on his trip to the South Pole with an IAATO member, so he had to follow some rules. But that doesn’t mean the trip came without risks.

[MUSIC]

The emperor penguins that Jeb says got so close to him are already classified as a threatened species. They’ve been denied more protections by the Treaty system.

Kara, the tour guide, has thought a lot about her role. She wrote a piece for Outside Magazine called “The Impossible Dilemma of a Polar Guide.”

KW: People know that travel produces carbon emissions, and traveling to polar regions to see ice that is melting due to carbon emissions really creates this paradox that’s hard to deal with for many of us. And we see as guides that some people choose not to think about it at all, and others do feel some conflicting emotions.

TM: Kara still thinks it’s good for people to travel to Antarctica. She’s even in favor of some of the newer, more controversial activities — like helicopter rides and submersible voyages.

KW: There are some people in the industry and outside of it who think that’s not necessary. And no, of course, it’s not necessary. Nothing is necessary. We don’t, the ships aren’t necessary. But it does open up this whole different world that we are so unfamiliar with generally.

TM: She thinks tourism will help protect it long term.

KW: We hope very much that the people who come do feel that same passion, that same amazement, the same love that we feel for this incredible, sort of, frozen world, and act as ambassadors to do something, to speak up as advocates for this place, to change some habits in their daily lives, perhaps.

TM: This is something almost everyone in the tourism industry says — both guides and visitors: that once you see Antarctica for yourself, you’ll be motivated to protect it. But does that really happen?

EL: The evidence so far has been pretty mixed, to be honest.

TM: Here’s Elle again, who studies the Antarctic tourism industry.

EL: People have shown that there is an effect, but it tends to wane pretty quickly after a few months. I think it does have a big impact on people, but people need to be able to channel that impact into concrete ways to protect the continent. And I don’t think we’re quite there with that yet.

TM: Without an obvious thing that ordinary people can do when they get home, this idea falls flat. If you really have to go, Elle says there are a few steps you can take to minimize your impact: Scan the website of the company that you’re booking with and make sure it’s an IAATO member.

EL: I think tourists can make very deliberate decisions about who they travel with. You can normally tell if an operator on their website, for example, is addressing environmental problems upfront. That’s a first thing to be aware of. Whereas other operators will be emphasizing luxury, for example.

[SOUND UP FROM YOUTUBE VIDEO BY KARL WATSON]

CRUISE SHIP STAFF OVER LOUDSPEAKER: So I’d like to welcome the captain and his officers…

[SOUND OF CLAPPING, SHEERING]

CAPTAIN: It’s an amazing achievement to go down to Antarctica, the last place that’s owned by nobody. Cheers to all of you!

GROUP: Cheers!

[SOUND OF CLAPPING, GLASSES CLINKING]
[SOUND OF PENGUINS CHIRPING]
[MUSIC]
TM: Everyone we spoke with for this episode agreed on one thing: There’s no place on earth like Antarctica. Hearing them search for the words to describe it made me want to visit. I wondered, if I could even afford to make the trip one day, would I be able to find a way to do it responsibly? I could go with an IAATO member, and even look for a company with more environmentally friendly, hybrid ships, couldn’t I?
But I couldn’t stop thinking about Marilyn, who can’t bring herself to return to this incredible place that she fell in love with — even though, as a researcher, she has good reason to go time and time again. The fact is, despite our best efforts, just by being in a place where humans aren’t meant to be, we make an impact. One study calculated that each tourist visiting Antarctica effectively melts 83 tons of snow there. 83 tons!
It’s often the case that laws and policies around tourism only come after a problem arises. Just because our governments are falling short on regulating tourism to the continent doesn’t mean we, travelers, should neglect our responsibility to care.
[THEME MUSIC]

This is Peak Travel. I’m your host, Tariro Mzezewa.

Our executive producer is Tom Grahsler.

Our senior producer is Michael Olcott. Our producer is Michaela Winberg, and our associate producer is Bibiana Correa.

Our editor is Meg Driscoll. Original music by Catherine Anderson. Mixing and sound design by Emma Munger. Engineering by Al Banks, Charlie Kaier, and Diana Martinez. Our tile art was created by Nick Rogacki.

Special thanks to Jeb Brooks, Alice Ford, Carolyn Philpotts, and Karl Watson, who shared audio for this episode.

Peak Travel is a production of WHYY, distributed by PRX, and part of the NPR podcast network. Find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, the iHeart Radio app — or wherever you get your podcasts.

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