When HX Expeditions’ Tudor Morgan spoke to ABC News in August 2025, he was an Antarctic ambassador. The expedition cruise industry, he said, “has the opportunity to really sort of fly the flag for safe and environmentally responsible tourism.”

The title captures an appealing idea: a journey to Antarctica can have an afterlife. Passengers return home knowing more about the continent, caring more about its future and, the industry hopes, doing something useful with that concern.

Four months earlier, the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators added ambassadorship to its bylaws. Members committed to cultivating advocates inspired by firsthand or other meaningful experiences of Antarctica. The wording includes people who have never been there and says the effort should be encouraged without regard to commercial gain.

“IAATO’s members are united in the belief that every visitor can become an advocate, and every advocate can help make a difference,” said Steve Jones, chair of its Antarctic Ambassadorship Committee, in the announcement.

The important word is “can.” This is an undertaking to encourage advocacy, not a guarantee of what every passenger becomes. For someone contemplating the journey, though, the possibility is attractive. A holiday that means a great deal personally might also help the place that made it possible.

That prospect now accompanies travel on a substantial scale. For the 2025–26 season, IAATO reports 85,195 landed visits and 27,217 cruise-only visitors, alongside 1,106 deep-field visitors. What happens after all those encounters is worth examining as closely as what happens during them.

What passengers bring home

In a 2023 scoping review, Julianne Reas, Yu-Fai Leung and Daniela Cajiao examined research on polar tourist ambassadorship. Their search selected 16 English-language, peer-reviewed papers published between 2001 and 2022: eight focused on Antarctica, seven on the Arctic and one on both. Some studied visitors; others examined the concepts. They were not sixteen equivalent tests of a single proposition.

The vocabulary was part of the problem. Ambassador, steward and advocate described overlapping roles, often without settled definitions. Researchers measured knowledge, attitudes, intentions and reported behavior. Each can reveal something about the passenger. Establishing what the continent gains requires another step.

There were encouraging findings. One Antarctic study found knowledge gains still evident three months after a voyage. General environmental behavioral intentions increased immediately afterward, then “remained stable.” This suggests sustained intention over the period studied, although intention and action remain different measures.

Longer-term evidence exists, too. A 2021 study by Christy Hehir and colleagues examined former participants in Students on Ice, an educational polar expedition program. They surveyed some up to eighteen years after their voyage. The research found relationships between identification with the alum community, connection to nature, and reported environmental behavior. Hehir later presented the findings as evidence to the UK Parliament.

The alum connection is suggestive. Perhaps what happens after an expedition helps determine what the experience becomes. A youth program with continuing engagement, however, is a particular kind of journey. Its results cannot simply be extended to everyone buying a commercial cruise. Nor does surveying former participants show how they would have behaved had they stayed home.

The 2023 review offers grounds for serious investigation of ambassadorship. It does not establish that commercial Antarctic voyages reliably produce conservation benefits that outweigh their environmental costs. That larger claim requires more evidence than a finding that people learned something, or still cared months later.

The cost of getting there

The journey’s footprint has a clearer numerical outline. A study led by Cajiao, published online in 2025 in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism, used satellite vessel tracking, engine specifications and aircraft emissions data to estimate the footprint of four forms of Antarctic tourism.

For the 2022–23 season, the estimate was 674,696 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. The average was 6.41 metric tons per traveler: 2.26 from flights and 4.15 from the cruise component. Getting to the departure point accounts for a substantial share.

For scale, Eurostat put the EU’s consumption-based greenhouse gas footprint at 9.0 metric tons per person in 2023. The Antarctic journey estimate is roughly 70 percent of that annual figure. The accounting boundaries differ, so the comparison illustrates magnitude rather than an exact equivalence between a holiday and everyday life.

The average also conceals differences in routes and voyage lengths. The analysis excluded deep-field expeditions, yachts, and sightseeing overflights. It is an estimate for the travel assessed in one season, not the footprint of every Antarctic booking.

Cajiao supplied another perspective in her ABC interview: “Even though Antarctica continues being the highest destination when it comes to emissions (per person), it’s also important to note that it’s less than 2 percent of the cruise contributions in the world.”

The study is not a ranking of every possible holiday. Her broader point is about scale: a destination can account for a small share of global cruise emissions while imposing a substantial footprint per passenger. The smaller total does not make an individual voyage low-carbon.

What settles on the snow

Some effects are concentrated around the places people visit. Black carbon, the soot produced by burning fuel, darkens snow. The surface absorbs more sunlight and melts earlier.

For a 2022 study in Nature Communications, Raúl Cordero of the University of Santiago, Chile, and colleagues sampled snow at 28 sites along a roughly 2,000-kilometer transect over four Antarctic summers. Around research facilities and popular landing sites, concentrations exceeded the continental background. Their modeling indicated that the soot could reduce seasonal snowpack at affected sites by up to 23 millimeters of water equivalent each summer.

The team estimated that tourism-related soot accelerated the melting of about 4.4 million metric tons of snow annually. Dividing that regional estimate by an average of roughly 53,000 visitors over the 2016–17 to 2019–20 seasons produced an arresting figure: 83 metric tons per visitor, plus or minus 43.

The uncertainty is substantial. The estimate describes seasonal snow melting earlier in affected areas, not 83 tons of permanent ice-sheet loss personally attributable to each passenger arriving today.

Research operations also leave a footprint. For eleven stations on King George Island, the team estimated about 0.4 million metric tons of accelerated annual snowmelt. Divided by roughly 700 station beds, that came to about 600 metric tons per bed, with an uncertainty of about 300.

The paper linked the larger research footprint to the “intensive use of fuel-powered equipment at scientific stations.” It does compare research and tourism, but the calculations use different areas and denominators. They cannot supply a precise, universal ratio between a scientist and a tourist, or decide the value of either person’s presence. They do support the case for cleaner power and transport across Antarctic operations.

“Antarctica is the last continent more or less unpolluted. I think we should try to keep it that way,” Cordero told The Guardian in February 2022. The concern extends to the people studying the continent as well as those selling passage to it.

What an operator should be able to explain

In the ABC report, Amanda Lynnes, IAATO’s environmental senior advisor, explicitly rejected the idea that ambassadorship was about “justifying” travel. “It’s more about seizing that opportunity when you’re in Antarctica,” she said.

She also described the immediate task: “As an organization that has a mission for safe, responsible travel … reducing absolute emissions is a key part of the work.”

Absolute matters. A ship can become more efficient while a growing fleet or a busier season increases the total footprint. An operator’s account of environmental progress needs to make that distinction visible.

In a September 2026 statement, responding to research on former expedition guides, IAATO again acknowledged that education should not become a convenient justification for environmental consequences. It argued that the potential of advocacy should neither be exaggerated nor dismissed because measurement is difficult.

That leaves useful questions for anyone choosing a voyage. Does the emissions estimate include the flights? If passengers contribute money or observations to a scientific project, who receives them and how are they used? What opportunities to support conservation continue after the trip?

For the industry, the harder task is to follow that activity over time. They can investigate donations and sustained advocacy. Researchers must also account for the possibility that people already inclined to care about Antarctica are the people most likely to book. A conservation benefit need not be converted into a carbon equivalent to have value, but it needs its own evidence.

A powerful reason remains to want the journey. Seeing Antarctica may become one of the defining experiences of a life. Its environmental cost does not erase that personal value, just as personal transformation does not erase the cost.

For a traveler who hopes to help protect the continent, the most revealing part of the itinerary may be the part an operator plans for after the voyage. A changed passenger is a promising beginning. What that person does next is where the conservation claim has to earn its place.

What this tells you

Inspiration needs follow-through. Research offers encouraging signs, including engagement years after educational expeditions. It does not make a conservation outcome automatic for a commercial voyage.

Read the boundaries around the numbers. The emissions estimate covers specific travel in one season. The snowmelt estimate concerns earlier seasonal melting. Neither is a universal bill attached to every visitor.

Ask about life after disembarkation. Continued engagement and evidence of useful action give an ambassadorship program substance. They belong alongside efforts to reduce the journey’s footprint.