Antarctic tour guides quit over tourism's devastating environmental toll

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Despite being one of the remotest places on Earth, more than 100,000 people journey to Antarctica every year. And within the next few years, the number of tourists flocking to the continent each summer could reach 450,000 . That's far fewer people than visit the Great Barrier Reef or Grand Canyon National Park, but Antarctic tourism comes with a colossal carbon footprint — and the frozen continent is a particularly vulnerable place.

A study published online July 8 in the journal Annals of Tourism Research reveals the impacts of Antarctic tourism from the perspectives of 25 former guides who, year after year, took visitors on cruise ships to some of the most remote locations on Earth. What these guides witnessed eventually made them quit, the study and an accompanying article in The Conversation show.

To find out exactly what drove the tour guides to leave their roles and whether such individual choices make a difference to Antarctica's overall condition, Live Science spoke with two of the study's authors: social anthropologist Zdenka Sokolickova and polar tourism researcher Liz Cooper , who both work at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Sokolickova and Cooper divided the interviews between them, speaking with 14 male guides and 11 female guides about their experiences. Together, those conversations shone a light on the reality of Antarctic cruises and the huge emotional toll of quitting a dream job.

Sascha Pare: How did you get the idea to interview former Antarctic tour guides?

Zdenka Sokolickova: We both started to work as postdocs on this project. We started with interviewing current Antarctic tour guides, because we wanted to know more about the industry, and about how they felt about the tourism development. The industry is booming; it's growing rapidly. And with more vessels, more tour operators and more people wanting to go and visit on a guided tour, there is also a bigger need for guides. So more people are accepted into the industry, and that comes with consequences; for example, the industry might need to lower the standards for qualifications, or there are safety risks coming with people who have less experience.

But we also heard that, at the same time, some tour guides are leaving the industry. We felt that it could be interesting to get to talk to these quitters, because they are likely critical and without vested interests in the industry, since they have deliberately left. We posted ads or calls for participants on closed Facebook groups, because we also know that the polar-guiding identity is quite strong and people tend to stay connected to the community, at least digitally or virtually. Within six days, we had 30 sign-ups. It went really fast, which kind of confirmed that there is a need within the community to voice some concerns.

Liz Cooper: We were also motivated to do this study because, generally speaking, tourism research usually incorporates the voices of people who are connected to the industry. It's not so common to see the voices of people who have removed themselves from the industry or refuse to engage with the tourism industry.

Antarctic tourism is, on a global level, a small industry. Around 120,000 people per year go to Antarctica [as of 2025/2026]. But the really interesting thing about Antarctic tourism is, of course, that this is the most remote place on Earth that you can visit as a tourist. This means also that it's the most carbon-intensive form of tourism that you can engage in on Earth. And, of course, it's an extremely fragile place, as well. So you have enormous global environmental impacts from the emissions from long-haul flights and from cruise ships, and then you have wildlife populations and a very fragile ecosystem there that is easily pitched out of balance. We also don't know very much about how tourism impacts the ecosystem in Antarctica either. We do know that it's bad, but we don't really know how bad. It's, in those terms, a risky practice, I would say.

A former guide told the researchers: "Very often, for long periods of time, the penguins had maybe a few hours’ break during the night. Otherwise there were hundreds of people walking through the colonies non-stop." (Image credit: Mint Images via Getty Images) SP: Did the former guides mention specific events that contributed to, or propelled, their decision to leave the industry?

ZS: In the "Mind the gaps" paper [the Annals of Tourism Research study published July 8], we speak about these tipping points that can be external or internal. External means that something in the outer world happens that makes you realize that you cannot continue like this any longer. We had quite strong accounts of that happening, like the cruise ship breaking the sea ice for the sake of the guests' experience so that they could land on the ice, for example, and observe wildlife or get to a place.

Many of these former Antarctic tour guides were polar tour guides, meaning that they also worked in the Arctic . For some of them, this decision happened through experiencing both Arctic and Antarctic tourism, so some of these tipping points happened in the Arctic. But we still felt it's relevant for our analysis, because polar tourism is connected, even though geographically, these are separated regions. We had a very strong account of something that happened in the Arctic, where the cruise ship hit a whale , even though the tour guide saw it and he was trying to communicate that. But there is a hierarchy in the chain of command that he couldn't break. He ran to the bridge and told off the captain, and then, after that incident, he quit.

There was a story about someone finding a little penguin chick in a boot hole. Normally, when you're trampling over snow in Antarctica, you're wearing these snowshoes — boots — and you're supposed to cover up the holes when you're leaving the place. But, obviously, not everyone does that. And so this person found a little chick that was struggling and couldn't climb up the boot hole. That also was a tipping point; it was the moment when that person realized, "I don't want to participate in this any longer, because if I weren't here, this little creature would have died."

The really interesting thing about Antarctic tourism is, of course, that this is the most remote place on Earth that you can visit as a tourist. This means also that it's the most carbon-intensive form of tourism that you can engage in on Earth.

Liz Cooper, polar tourism researcher at University of Groningen

LC: The most striking story that I remember was a participant who was talking about how the ship that they were working on sometimes would try and find a place on the sea ice to land, so that they can get the guests out walking on the sea ice. Not all companies do this, but some do. And then, they have to put the gangway down onto the ice so that people can walk directly out onto it. This piece of ice that they had chosen was apparently too thin, or too unstable or something. Where the gangway was connected to the ice, the ice kept breaking, so the ship kept having to move farther into this ice floe to get a secure holding.

On this piece of ice, the participant remembers that there were penguins with their chicks. And penguin chicks, when they're born, have fluffy down feathers, which are not waterproof, so they can't swim until these feathers have molted and they grow waterproof feathers. What this participant recalled was that, as the ship was moving in to get a hold on the ice, it broke this ice floe into many parts. Penguin chicks became isolated on smaller ice floes. Our participant remembered thinking, "That chick is not going to shed its down feather before this small ice floe melts." Essentially, our participant came to the conclusion that these chicks wouldn't make it.

SP: Emotionally, how easy was it for these guides to quit their jobs?

ZS: For some people, it was more difficult internally, emotionally, to make that decision, and for others, it was easier. We think that for those who were more environmentally concerned, it was, maybe a bit counterintuitively, more difficult to take that decision. Now we could speculate [about why]: Was that bond with the place stronger? Also, the emotions that were felt upon quitting were very mixed, I would say. It was a mixture of both feeling angry and feeling sad with feeling relieved — a "weight lifted," as someone put it.

But it definitely was, for many people, a struggle that took a long time in terms of years — from when you realize that your values actually cannot reconcile with what you engage in; through you realizing that there is a radical solution to that, and that you cannot muddle through or find alternative justifications; to deciding to quit; and still from there, to actually quitting. There is a path to walk. You can have decided, but you still can be doing the job, not feeling good about that.

SP: Has it been easy for these people to find new jobs that are more aligned with their values?

LC: We found that many of those who had quit primarily for environmental reasons and had gone through this particularly difficult decision-making process then made it their life objective, or aim, to do something good for the environment. We have a group of participants who actually moved into environmentally focused jobs. We have somebody who went on to set up an environmental NGO [nongovernmental organization]; we have somebody who went on to fight wildfires; various sustainability positions. It was, for some of the participants, not just a difficult and life-changing decision in the sense that it was hard to do but also because it changed the trajectory of their lives into becoming somebody who's more actively pro-environmental in the world.

A former guide told the researchers: "You’d see massive glacier calvings, and you’d just want to cry. But all the guests would be cheering." (Image credit: Andrew Peacock via Getty Images) SP: Did any of them regret their decision to quit?

ZS: Many of them did, until this day. Since it was a difficult decision to make and to act upon, it still triggers emotions, and people still think back. Yes, some of them do resent and regret and wish it was less environmentally harmful and wish they still could be having that dream job.

SP: Did any of the former guides reflect on the effectiveness of their decision, given that someone else could have potentially replaced them in their job the very next day?

LC: Yes. As I recall, many of our participants actually didn't really believe that their decision would make an impact in the overall environmental state of Antarctica. I don't agree with that. But there was a general feeling that, "OK, my individual choice isn't going to make a difference in the grand scheme of things" — also because, like you say, they expect that they will just be replaced, and probably replaced by somebody who's less environmentally concerned than them and might engage with Antarctic tourism practices in a less environmentally responsible way, which actually might make things worse. But in those cases, the decision to leave was basically mainly based on this internal conflict — this uneasiness that got so monumental that they couldn't live anymore doing this job.

What we do in the paper, now on a bit more of an academic level, is we argue that even though, yes, a single choice of an individual really makes an incremental change to the enormous problem of the climate crisis, these decisions [can be framed as] high-impact, pro-environmental behaviors. Because when you look at other individual behaviors that people are encouraged to do in their lives to reduce their carbon footprint, reduction of long-haul flying is one of the most impactful things you can do. And these guides were traveling several times per year — long-haul, back and forth — to South America, and then on cruise ships a lot, which are also carbon-intensive. Their reduction in their carbon footprint by making that choice has been massive. Even though they were feeling personally like maybe they weren't making that much of a difference, I do think that their choices have made a big difference.

SP: Was there anything in the interviews that surprised you?

ZS: Several of them said that they felt alone when they were going through this process of deciding and after [they quit]. They said that the fact that we asked for their opinions and their stories made them feel that they're actually part of a bigger community of people. It made me feel like we're actually responding to a need that exists in the field and that these people actually want to be heard. They want their concerns to be public, but they maybe had feared repercussions, or had even faced some repercussions, when they were being critical while still working in the industry.

SP: Did your interviews touch on other popular destinations where tourism may be doing more harm than good? I'm thinking, for example, of the Galápagos Islands and "last-chance" tourism in the Arctic.

ZS: They actually did. Some of the participants who quit in Antarctica still guide in the Arctic. So what we often heard was this juxtaposition, or comparing what it's like to be guiding in Antarctica and in the Arctic. The often-repeated argument, which I resonate with, is that in the Arctic, there are human communities. If it's their desire to choose this tourism path, tourism can be benefiting the human communities. In Antarctica, there are no permanent human settlements, and the nonhuman Indigenous inhabitants of Antarctica have no voice. Who asks the penguins, or the krill, or the orcas whether they want tourism there? If we could ask them, they would probably say no. Also, many of the guides live either in Northern Europe or North America, so the travel is shorter to the Arctic. It just makes more sense for them to stay in the business up there and quit in the South.

I actually did have one guide who also had experience from Bali, for example, and other regions in Southeast Asia. There, the reflections were actually around how destructive tourism can be in Indigenous regions, where people have no say and they don't benefit from tourism; they're just being "consumed" as a resource, as a sightseeing item, basically. That person quit cruise guiding overall, because they felt it was destructive.

LC: We also had a few people who, in their life after the decision, still worked in tourism but deliberately only in very local tourism. They, for example, set up a kayaking company in the local area where they lived, because they're still passionate about showing people beautiful places and connecting people with nature, but they simply couldn't reconcile taking people so far to create that connection with nature.

"To this day, Antarctica … stays in the forefront of my head as the most incredibly raw environment that deserves all the care and protection. And I just think tourism and us being there was doing the opposite of that completely," a former guide told the researchers. (Image credit: David Merron Photography via Getty Images) SP: Having done this work, what do you think people should consider when booking their next vacation?

LC: I would like people to properly research the impacts and consider, if the impact is significant, whether they really need to go or whether they can go in a low-impact way. For example, can you take the train instead of a plane? And if you have to take a plane, do you really have to go?

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ZS: Several of the tour guides actually said they wished people asked themselves, "Why am I going to this place?" If it's just to tick off the seventh continent or the 75th country, or if it's just to show off on social media that you have a selfie from the Antarctic continent, then it's not worth this enormous carbon footprint.

If it's to feel a connection with nature and be away from the urban, hectic life, you definitely do not need to go to a place that is this remote. Perhaps you have a place where you can feel that connection with nature just a couple of kilometers away.

If it's this lifelong dream, I don't feel entitled to say, "You shouldn't go," because for those people, it really plays a big role in their lives. But the "bucket listers," as the guides often called them — the guides felt like these people actually don't belong, and maybe even they don't deserve this beauty and this breathtaking fragility, to be consumed and to be forgotten the next month, when another intercontinental holiday is happening.

This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.