More people are venturing out to explore the world’s coldest corners before it’s too late.
Ice caps in far-flung destinations around the globe are rapidly melting due to climate change, making a new travel trend called “last chance tourism” both more popular and riskier as visitors rush to see the disappearing glaciers and ice caves, The New York Times reported. Those rising temperatures have taken a toll in cold-weather places like Iceland—a vacation hot spot where half a million people partake in epic Arctic adventures each year.
One of the most popular activities travelers can sign up for while visiting the country is glacier tours. However, intense meltwater runoff is making the excursions even more treacherous, according to the Icelandic park service. Last month, an American tourist died while on a group tour within Vatnajokull National Park. During the outing, the Breiðamerkurjökull ice cave collapsed, killing the man and injuring his girlfriend.
“It’s a good example of the consequence that climate change can have on glacier tourism,” Emmanuel Salim, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Toulouse in France, told The New York Times.
Since the incident occurred, ice cave tours have been temporarily suspended, and in the meantime, tour operators are looking for ways to make these trips safer, like adding more guardrails and revamping hiking paths, bridges, and stairs. However, rising temperatures can oftentimes make weather less predictable. For example, over in Canada, Corin Lohmann, the owner of IceWalks, reroutes trails to the Athabasca Glacier in Alberta two to three times each season because of glacier melt. In addition, wildfires shut down his routes through Jasper National Park this summer.
“Emerging events can happen that never happened in the past,” added Johannes Theodorus Welling, a postdoctoral researcher in glacier tourism at the University of Iceland.
Despite the Iceland accident that occurred in August, interest in extreme tourism is booming, which means the more people that visit these fragile sites threatened by climate change, the faster and more likely they are to deteriorate. And to put it plainly, the Land of Fire and Ice is having trouble living up to its name these days.
“There are more outdoor enthusiasts, but glaciers are also more unstable than they used to be,” Trevor Kreznar, general manager of Exit Glacier Guides in Kenai Fjords National Park, Alaska, explained to the NYT. “If there were just more enthusiasts but glaciers remained the same as in the 1980s, it wouldn’t be as big of a deal.”
