Antarctica Is Enormous. So Why Do Expedition Ships Keep Visiting the Same Places?

Antarctica is almost unimaginably large.

At around 14 million square kilometres, the continent is roughly one and a half times the size of the United States. Look at a map, and it seems reasonable to assume that the tens of thousands of expedition travellers visiting each year could easily disappear into a wilderness of that scale.

But that isn't how Antarctic expedition cruising works.

New figures from the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators, IAATO, caught our attention at ExplorEarth.

Overall vessel passenger numbers fell by approximately 4.2% during the 2025–26 season. Yet the number of passengers who actually went ashore increased by around 6%, from 80,455 to 85,195.

It raises an interesting question.

On a continent this enormous, why should an additional few thousand people going ashore matter?

The answer is geography.

For most expedition travellers, Antarctica means the Antarctic Peninsula and its surrounding islands.

Already, that concentrates tourism into a tiny fraction of the continent.

Then narrow it down again.

An expedition ship needs somewhere it can operate safely. Zodiacs need appropriate conditions to reach shore. Guests need somewhere they can physically land and walk. Wildlife sensitivities need to be considered. Sea ice, swell, wind, cliffs, glaciers and exposed coastlines can all remove otherwise interesting locations from consideration.

Add the things travellers actually come to experience, such as penguin colonies, historic sites, spectacular viewpoints and accessible wildlife, and the number of practical locations becomes smaller still.

So while Antarctica itself is enormous, human access to it is surprisingly pinpointed.

That is why the number of people going ashore is particularly interesting.

At first glance, one solution seems obvious.

Antarctica has an enormous coastline, so if expedition ships repeatedly visit the same locations around the Antarctic Peninsula, why not spread visitors across more of the continent?

The numbers show just how dramatic that geographical imbalance already is.

During the 2024–25 season, IAATO recorded 411 traditional expedition cruise departures to the Antarctic Peninsula, carrying 68,968 passengers. On the other side of the continent, there were just eight Ross Sea and continental departures, carrying 1,258 passengers.

That means more than 50 times as many traditional seaborne expedition passengers travelled to the Peninsula as travelled on Ross Sea and continental voyages.

The Ross Sea is therefore a useful example of just how misleading Antarctica's enormous size can be when thinking about tourism.

It offers some extraordinary expedition experiences, from enormous Adélie penguin colonies and spectacular ice landscapes to historic sites associated with Scott and Shackleton. Yet reaching it generally involves much longer voyages from New Zealand or Australia, and only a small number of expedition ships operate there each season.

IAATO itself describes most Antarctic cruises as travelling from southern South America to the northern Antarctic Peninsula. At the same time, only a limited number operate to the Ross Sea side of the continent.

But even within the much more accessible Antarctic Peninsula, simply opening additional landing sites isn't necessarily the answer.

Creating access to previously little-visited places can spread human impact into areas that have so far experienced very little disturbance. A location also needs to be suitable for safe ship and Zodiac operations, have terrain where passengers can actually get ashore and move safely, and allow visits without unacceptable disturbance to wildlife.

Weather, sea ice, swell and wind narrow the possibilities further.

So Antarctica doesn't have a shortage of coastline. It has a shortage of coastline that is practical for large numbers of expedition travellers to reach and responsibly step ashore.

That creates an intriguing contradiction.

Protecting heavily visited locations might suggest spreading visitors across more of Antarctica. Protecting Antarctica's wilderness might suggest the opposite: leave places that are rarely visited largely untouched.

The answer is unlikely to be simply creating more landing sites.

Instead, it may be about understanding which established locations can sustainably accommodate visitation, which require greater protection, where carefully selected alternatives could relieve pressure, and how to distribute ships among them.

It is also why looking only at Antarctica's total visitor numbers can be misleading.

The continent may cover 14 million square kilometres. Still, the overwhelming majority of expedition tourism takes place in one comparatively small part of it, before concentrating again in the limited number of places where people can actually get ashore.

This is the part of Antarctic tourism that isn't immediately obvious when looking at the continent on a globe.

Expedition cruising isn't spread evenly around its coastline.

Instead, activity is concentrated around accessible parts of the Antarctic Peninsula and then concentrated again around locations suitable for actual landings.

Those sites effectively become pinch points between a growing human desire to experience Antarctica and a landscape that offers relatively few practical places to do it.

And they're not used by tourism alone.

Research stations, scientific programmes, vessels and aircraft also concentrate human activity in parts of Antarctica.

That cumulative footprint is now attracting greater scientific attention.

New research led by British Antarctic Survey environmental researcher Kevin Hughes argues that Antarctica could make greater use of Antarctic Specially Managed Areas, or ASMAs, to help coordinate human activity and minimise environmental impacts. 

ASMAs can coordinate different human activities within particular geographical areas and help minimise environmental impacts.

Yet they have barely been expanded.

Seven were agreed between 2004 and 2008. One was subsequently de-designated, and no new ASMA has been created since.

Hughes argues that revitalising the system could help Antarctica manage areas where tourism, scientific programmes and other human activities increasingly overlap.

That doesn't automatically mean restricting expedition tourism.

It means looking much more closely at where activity happens, rather than relying on the total number of visitors as our principal measure of pressure.

There is another reason the latest statistics are worth understanding.

Not everybody travelling to Antarctica goes ashore.

IAATO recorded 85,195 landed visitors during 2025–26, alongside 27,217 cruise-only visitors who experienced Antarctica from their ship without making landings.

The environmental footprint of those two experiences isn't identical, and even within those 85,195 landed visitors, activity isn't evenly distributed.

Some locations receive ships repeatedly throughout the season, while others are visited occasionally, and many places are never visited at all.

Weather and ice will concentrate things further, and if several planned locations on an itinerary become inaccessible, expedition teams need alternatives, potentially adding further demand to the sites that remain available.

It is why simply quoting an annual Antarctic visitor number doesn't tell the whole story.

There is a fascinating contradiction here.

Protecting heavily visited locations might suggest that expedition operators should spread their guests across more of Antarctica.

Protecting Antarctica's wilderness might suggest precisely the opposite.

Leave untouched places untouched.

The answer lies somewhere between the two.

Some existing locations may be resilient enough to accommodate carefully managed visitation. Others may require tighter controls. Alternative sites may sometimes relieve pressure, while opening entirely new areas could extend our footprint.

Understanding those differences will become increasingly important.

Antarctica's great appeal is its scale.

Standing on the deck of an expedition ship surrounded by mountains, glaciers and ice, it can feel as though the wilderness extends forever.

In many ways, it does.

But our ability to physically enter that wilderness is much more limited.

Antarctica may cover 14 million square kilometres, but expedition travellers interact directly with only a tiny collection of accessible places.

That is why the increase from 80,455 to 85,195 people going ashore last season caught our attention. Not because another 4,740 people somehow threaten a continent the size of Antarctica, but because those people aren't being distributed across 14 million square kilometres.

They're arriving at some of the same small points on its enormous coastline.