Holidaying in Antarctica II

This post is about even more impacts that tourism has had on the Antarctic environment.

Oil Spills

Oil spills that have occurred in Antarctica have never been of the same magnitude as oil spills that occur from oil pipe leakages such as the BP oil spill in 2010, where 210 million gallons of crude oil was spilt (The Telegraph, 2011), or the Little Buffalo oil spill in Canada that occurred in 2011, spilling more than 800,000 gallons (Yahoo News, 2014). Nevertheless, this does not mean that they don’t have severe consequences when they occur. If anything, oil spills have an even worse effect because marine life here is much less adaptable and rarer. 

When ships travel down to Antarctica they sometimes have oil spills. The frequency of oil spills is shown in table 1, along with a summary of their impacts on wildlife.

Source: Aronson et al. (2011)

From the table, it is clear that oil spills in Antarctica don’t happen as often as the spills that appear in the news from drilling sites. Over the past 30 years, Aronson et al. (2011) seem to report just five spills. Interestingly, all of the reported oil spills have occurred during Antarctica’s summer, confirming that these are impacts from tourism. Some of these oil spills had no reported effects, demonstrating that there should be no concern about tourism related oil spills, right?

Not quite! The reason why oil spills in Antarctica are problematic is that Antarctica does not have infrastructure to deal with oil spills properly. They don’t have infrastructure to undertake large scale clean-up operations or clean up oil soaked mammals. Moreover it is difficult to conduct these operations because of harsh conditions during the winter. Because of this, the effects of large oil spills can have long run impacts of marine and terrestrial wildlife.

Bahia Paraiso

The largest oil spill that happened was when the Bahia Paraiso tourist ship sank, carrying 130 tourists (but luckily they all evacuated just before the sinking!). The wildlife impacts of this spill were significant. The South Polar Skua, pictured in figure 1, is a sea bird found prominently in Antarctica. Antarctica is the bird’s natural habitat. Following the oil spill in 1989, the mortality rate among this bird species increased sharply and remained high while the oil was present. This could have been because the birds feed on krill and fish, both of these were chemically contaminated as a result of the spill. Young chicks were affected the most, with all of the chicks of a sample of 53 nests dying during the spill in December (Eppley and Rubega, 1990).  One reason for this was that parents had been fouled by the diesel oil when they went out looking for food in oil slicks (where fish and krill are found). Because of this, they spent more time away from their nests to bathe in freshwater ponds before returning to their nests. In the meantime this left young chicks unprotected and vulnerable to attack by other skuas. This affect was widespread and affected the entire population.

Figure 1: South Polar Skua

Other effects of this oil spill include the transfer of oil from parents to young or from prey to predator; changes in food availability due to effects on other populations and toxicity resulting in mortality of Adélie penguins. 

So the bottom line is that oil spills are catastrophic to wildlife in Antarctica and wouldn’t even happen if it wasn’t for all those tourists and tourist companies making careless mistakes. The new score is negative impacts: 3, positive/natural impacts: 1.

Again, I understand this post may be slightly depressing, so I would like to end with a few positive points. I came across the ytravel blog which includes a page about Antarctica. Along with a great selection of photos of Antarctica, it also includes a list of reasons to visit Antarctica! It can be accessed by clicking here. Also, my next post will be about how Antarctic treaties and international laws are trying to protect Antarctica – it’s not all doom and gloom! Until then, I’m going to leave you with a short video to brighten up this post, illustrating why we should celebrate the wildlife in Antarctica. Although note - it seems that some of the clips were videoed by tourists!

Edit: If you would like to know more about tourism in Antarctica, Fiona has a wonderful post about it and also gives her perspective on tourism. Here is a link to her blog.