Polar Tourism: An Environmental Perspective

by Bernard Stonehouse, John Snyder

Overview

Tourism throughout the world raises environmental issues that are often concerned with conflicting rights and responsibilities: the inherent right of mankind to travel, the no-less inherent right of indigenous people to guard their environmental heritage, and the responsibility of governments - local, national or (in the unique case of Antarctica) international - to protect environments over which they exercise stewardship. Additionally, the presence of international commercial enterprises, especially marine and other mass transport modes, represent unique governance challenges.This book deals mainly with environmental issues and the management implications arising from polar tourism, one of the fastest-growing sectors of world tourism. However, many of the issues discussed here arise no less urgently in temperate and tropical wilderness areas, and indeed in any region where sensitive environments are subjected to mass tourism. The principles and guidelines discussed here are of interest and practical use in tourism studies generally.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781845411930
Publisher:	Channel View Publications
Publication date:	06/07/2010
Series:	Aspects of Tourism , #43
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Dr Bernard Stonehouse has spent four winters and many summers in Antarctic and sub-Antarctic environments, conducting ecological and behavioural research on birds and mammals, and the impacts of man on flora, fauna and soils. His most recent research includes an 18-year study of the growth, development, environmental implications and management of Antarctic tourism.

Dr John M. Snyder gained wilderness tourism experience as an Alaska Registered Guide and has applied his environmental management knowledge to assist Arctic governments and Native People. Those experiences were then used to evaluate tourism management issues in Antarctica and South Georgia. Most recently, he was a co-lead author of the Arctic Council’s 2009 Arctic Marine Shipping Assessment.

Read an Excerpt

Polar Tourism

An Environmental Perspective

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By Bernard Stonehouse, John M. Snyder

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2010 Bernard Stonehouse and John M. Snyder
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84541-193-0

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CHAPTER 1

Arctic and Antarctic: Polar Regions and Environments

Introducing the Polar Regions

Polar regions are the areas of land and ocean surrounding the north and south geographic poles: for maps see the inside covers of this book. Though most people think of them as very similar — essentially cold, hostile and isolated from the rest of the world — geographically they are very different:

• The Arctic region, in the far north, is centred on a sea basin, partly ringed by lands that are mostly poleward extensions of the northern continents.

• The Antarctic region, in the far south, is centred on a large ice-covered continent, isolated from other continents by a wide expanse of ocean.

Both regions lie far from historic centres of civilization, and for centuries were regarded as too remote, difficult and unproductive to be worth exploring. The spread of commercialism during the 18th and 19th centuries saw the maritime fringes of both regions explored, mainly for possible access to China via northeast, northwest and southern passages. The northern seaways proved elusive, but their approaches were quickly exploited for walrus ivory, seal skins, seal and whale oil and baleen (whale bone). Southern islands too were stripped of their fur seals and elephant seals, and Arctic lands in both New and Old Worlds were pillaged for furs. Late 19th- and early 20th-century explorers extended geographical knowledge in both regions, mapping, prospecting for minerals, investigating the human communities, studying influences of polar regions on the rest of the world, ultimately reaching both the north and south geographic poles.

Both geographic poles were first visited by man during the early 20th century, and both can now be visited by tourists. Visitors to the North Pole are likely to arrive by Russian icebreaker (Figure 1.1) on scheduled summer cruises from Murmansk. The ship's Global Position System (GPS) indicator will tell them when they have arrived. Once down the gangway they will be standing at sea level on a sheet of ice 3–5 m thick. Air temperature will be a little below freezing point. The ice is drifting slowly toward Greenland and Svalbard. There is no permanent habitation, and unlikely to be anyone else around. The ship's company set up a striped pole labelled 'NORTH POLE' and everyone dances around it. Hardy folk swim under careful supervision: the less hardy celebrate with Russian wine and a barbecue.

Visitors to the South Pole arrive overland by aircraft, tractor or on skis, probably with summer parties from coastal stations. They will be standing at around 2835 m above sea level, on a snow plain that overlies a cap of permanent ice some 3000 m thick. They will probably have GPS, but they'll also be in sight of a US scientific station that has been there since 1957. Air temperature will be around –40°. The position of the pole is marked by a barber's pole, ringed by oil drums and national flags. Station personnel may come out to meet them or invite them to visit, but not for long: there is work to be done.

Little now remains to be discovered geographically in either polar region, but both are still subject to intense scientific research in disciplines ranging from anthropology to zoology. In the mid-to-late 20th century, the Arctic became the front line in the struggle for ascendency between the Soviet Union and the USA. Called the 'Cold War', it involved both contestants and their allies menacing each other across the Arctic Ocean and establishing defensive positions on Arctic lands. By contrast, the Antarctic became a zone devoted to peace and the pursuit of science under the international Antarctic Treaty.

In the late 20th century, both regions became popular tourist venues, and both are rapidly increasing in public prominence as polar tourism develops and proliferates. This is surprising, because neither has shaken off its image as a stomping-ground for explorers and eccentrics. Despite global warming, both regions remain predominantly cold and windy, uncomfortable and far from user-friendly. Precipitation falls mainly as snow or sleet. Where the snow settles and persists, it compacts under its own weight to form ice. Liquid water is scarce: in the colder areas, lakes, ponds, streams, ground surfaces and soils remain frozen for much of the year. Surface waters of the sea freeze annually to a depth of a metre or more, producing fast ice and pack ice (pp. 8, 17) that inhibit navigation for several months each year — almost entirely in winter, and to varying degrees in summer.

Latitude for latitude the Arctic region is warmer than the Antarctic. Arctic lands are generally low lying, their climates dominated by the sea at temperatures close to freezing point. The Antarctic's high, central continent reaches much lower temperatures, providing a vast heat sink that chills the whole region and much of the southern hemisphere beyond.

Geographically, the Arctic includes or abuts on the sub-polar northern extremities of Asia, Europe and North America — continents from which it has for millennia recruited animals and plants hardy enough to withstand its extreme conditions. By contrast, Antarctica is separated from South America, its nearest neighbouring continent, by almost 1000 km (over 600 miles) of ocean, and stands in ecological isolation from the rest of the world. Its very limited terrestrial flora and fauna are recruited mainly from species that have been blown there and subsequently adapted to its harsher environments.

Despite their reputations as areas of cold and hard living conditions, both polar regions have proved attractive to tourists — the Arctic for over two centuries, the Antarctic to a more limited extent for over half a century. How tourism developed in both is discussed in Chapters 2 and 3.

Polar boundaries

Though both polar regions are well recognised and often cited in scientific and common usage, there is no general agreement on their geographical limits. This becomes important in certain contexts where precision is needed: in studies of tourism, for example, different authorities may use or imply different criteria for defining 'polar' in their published statistics of regional tourism. We provide no single answer — just a warning that 'polar' does not in itself imply a single precise boundary.

• Geographers traditionally divide the world into latitudinal zones bounded by particular parallels of latitude. For polar regions the selected boundaries are the Arctic and Antarctic circles, respectively, 66° 32' north and south of the equator. Either circle lies at the same distance of 2606 km (1619 miles) from its pole, and includes 40,333,466 km (15,755,260 sq miles), roughly 8% of Earth's surface. The circles' angular position, defined by the angle of Earth's axis to the plane of Earth's rotation about the sun, alters slightly from year to year within limits of a few minutes of arc (Figure 1.2). Beyond either circle the sun remains above the horizon for 24 hours on midsummer day, and below it for 24 hours on midwinter day.

• Polar circles, like other parallels of latitude, make good, clearly defined boundaries that can readily be shown on maps — characteristics that recommend them particularly to lawyers and legislators. However, they do not show up on Earth's surface, and do not separate polar from non-polar climates or ecologies. The areas they circumscribe differ widely in content. The Arctic Circle includes forests, farmlands, towns, cities, industries and a human population of 4 million. The Antarctic Circle rings a desert continent without trees, shrubs or continuous ground cover, with a transient human population numbered in hundreds. Anyone concerned with climatic, ecological or socio-political interests looks beyond the circles for more meaningful regional boundaries.

• Climatologists define polar regions as the circumpolar areas in which the mean temperature of the warmest month does not exceed 108C (508F), i.e. where summers are always cool enough to define a distinctive climatic zone. Such areas lie within a boundary provided by the 108C summer isotherm north and south. This boundary indicates more clearly than polar circles the areas within which living conditions remain cold for plants, animals and people even during the warmest season, and are thus limiting for many life processes. However, it provides no information on climate in other seasons, so it has no value in defining year-round polar conditions.

• Ecologists look for boundaries that separate recognisable 'polar' from 'sub-polar' plant and animal communities. They find two, respectively, for land and oceans. In the north, the treeline, or poleward limit beyond which forests are replaced by tundra or polar desert, is a useful terrestrial ecological boundary. It is circumpolar where land exists, visible on the ground and in aerial photographs, and easily represented on maps. The southern hemisphere has no direct equivalent. There is a recognisable treeline only at the tip of South America: a notional one passes well to the south of the other southern continents.

• Instead, southern ecologists use the maritime Antarctic Convergence or Polar Front, a variable zone on the ocean surface, usually a few kilometres wide, marking the boundary between polar and sub-polar water masses. There cold polar surface waters, in summer diluted by melting sea ice, meet and disappear below warmer, more saline waters from sub-polar regions. The boundary is sometimes visible at the surface in calm conditions. More usually it is detectable by a sudden difference in temperature of 2–3°C where the two water masses meet, and as such may appear in satellite imagery. Similar boundaries appear in sea areas of the northern hemisphere.

Why are polar regions cold?

However defined, and by whatever boundaries, polar regions are consistently colder than the rest of the world. This is basically because the incoming solar radiation that warms Earth strikes them obliquely rather than vertically. In consequence, they receive only about 40% as much incident radiation as equatorial regions.

Polar regions differ too from the rest of the world in their seasonal day lengths. In the tropics, day length varies little between summers and winters. In polar regions, summers are marked by long days and short nights, winters by the reverse. At the geographic poles, day length and seasons merge: the sun remains above the horizon for six months in summer and disappears for six months in winter.

Like the rest of Earth, polar regions radiate energy to space through the year. They would radiate considerably more but for the blanketing or 'greenhouse' effect of the atmosphere, which keeps some of the returning long-wave radiation (heat) in. As a whole the Arctic receives more solar energy than it loses, the more highly reflective Antarctic loses more than it gains (Stonehouse, 1989: 33–34). Mean air temperatures that characterise these regions (i.e. those derived from values obtained by meteorologists at standard heights close to the ground) are maintained by poleward flows of heat, borne by atmospheric and oceanic currents. Thus, the temperature at any time and in any part of the Arctic or Antarctic represents a point of balance between radiation gains and losses, and incoming heat from surrounding areas, all of which remain relatively stable from year to year.

These balances are, however, subject to long-term variations over time-scales measurable in millennia, and shorter-term variations measurable in centuries or even decades, both due mainly to fluctuations in the amount of radiation received from the sun. Changes that occur near the boundaries of polar regions, which involve a shift between freezing and non-freezing conditions, tend to be self-sustaining. Decreasing radiation, for example, chills ground and air, which allows more snow and ice to settle and persist: the resulting whiteness increases the albedo or reflectivity of the surface, reflecting more solar radiation back into space and causing further chilling. Thus, polar climates tend to be less stable and subject to more frequent and more drastic changes than those of temperate and tropical regions.

The current frigidity of polar regions, marked by the presence of icecaps and both permanent and seasonal sea ice at both ends of Earth, is an anomaly in the long-term history of the world. Humanity has arisen during an ice age that has lasted some 20–25 million years, in which the icy conditions of both polar regions have alternately spread and diminished as a result of both long-term and short-term shifts in the balance of radiation and other controlling factors. As little as ten thousand years ago, icecaps spread far more widely across the northern hemisphere, covering huge areas of northern Europe, Asia and North America.

Since then, gradual warming has caused the ice to retreat to its present limits, notably in Greenland and the Canadian Arctic islands. The southern hemisphere has similarly warmed, reducing glaciers in southern South America and New Zealand and many of the islands fringing Antarctica, and to a lesser degree those fringing the continent itself. The retreat is continuing today, almost certainly accelerated by the consequences of human industrial activity (pp. 65–68).

Within this overall long-term trend, occupying several millennia, polar and sub-polar climates remain changeable in the shorter terms of centuries and decades. Short-term changes produce warm and cold spells that must have radically affected the distribution and welfare of plant and animal communities in pre-historic times, and have certainly exerted control over human activities during recent centuries of exploration, occupation and exploitation. Similar changes in future decades cannot fail to influence ongoing human activities, including the developing tourist industry (Chapter 4).

The Arctic Region

Geography

In this chapter, we define the Arctic region by its main ecological boundary, the treeline. Central to the region lies the Arctic Ocean, a rectangular basin 2500 km wide between Canada and Siberia, 4000 km2 long from Alaska to Norway, occupying in all some 14 million km. East of the Greenwich meridian its shores are Eurasian, fringed by the Norwegian, Barents, Kara, Laptev and East Siberian seas. West of the meridian lie Greenland, Canada, Alaska and the eastern extremity of Siberia, fringed by the Chukchi and Beaufort seas. The central basin, over 4000 m deep, is divided into two sub-basins by the submarine Lomonosov Ridge, which crosses almost directly under the North Pole.

Almost all of the Arctic Ocean is ice-covered in winter. Off the coasts, annual ice forms each autumn and persists until spring, reaching thicknesses of 1–2 m. The centre is occupied by a mass of perennial ice that fails to melt completely during the short intervening summers, and reaches thicknesses of 5–10 m. Annual ice also forms in neighbouring seas and channels, local conditions determining when it appears and for how many months it persists. In recent years, climatic warming has reduced the amounts of both annual and perennial ice, increasing the period in which ships can navigate Arctic waters, thereby stimulating trade in Arctic ports, but causing concern for wildlife, especially seals and polar bears, which may be affected (Chapter 4).

The Siberian coast is fringed by a continental shelf up to 1000 km wide and less than 100 m deep — a vast submarine plain totalling almost half the area of the ocean. From this coast flow five large rivers that pour fresh water into the Arctic basin: the Lena alone delivers over 500 kmannually, some 35% in June, helping to disperse the last of the inshore sea ice. Off north Greenland and the Canadian archipelago the shelf is less than 200 km wide, the continental slope descends rapidly to depths of over 3000 m, and there is little input of fresh water. Along the Siberian coast, fleets of Soviet icebreakers have traditionally kept a 'Northeast Passage' open for shipping through summer, providing an important trade route between Siberian ports. Off north Greenland and North America, sea ice presses against the coasts and fills the inter-island channels, making the 'Northwest Passage' more difficult to maintain than its Siberian counterpart. Warming has recently improved prospects for both passages. The Northwest Passage, formerly barred by ice in all but exceptionally warm seasons, is now traversed several times yearly by passenger cruise vessels.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Polar Tourism by Bernard Stonehouse, John M. Snyder. Copyright © 2010 Bernard Stonehouse and John M. Snyder. Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Arctic and Antarctic: Polar Regions and Environments

Chapter 2. Arctic Tourism: History and Development

Chapter 3. Antarctic Tourism: History and Development

Chapter 4. Tourism in Changing Polar Environments

Chapter 5. Wilderness Tourism: Challenges and Techniques

Chapter 6. Managing Shipborne Tourism

Chapter 7. Polar Cultural and Heritage Tourism

Chapter 8. Southern Oceans and Antarctic Tourism

Chapter 9. Managing Polar Tourism: A Way Forward

Editorial Reviews

Readers of this book embark on a stimulating journey into the world of polar tourism. With a focus on management aspects and environmental implications, the intricacies of polar tourism are discussed in an educated and thoughtful manner. Further conceptual background is provided on wilderness and cultural tourism to enable an informed assessment of the framework within which polar tourism operates. A powerful concluding chapter applies the technique of Multiple Resource Management Planning to polar tourism. This book is a valuable resource for students, academics and policy makers alike.

Daniela Liggett