By Laura Husband
Tourist ships provide “a potential monitoring network for climate change,” said climate change and penguin conservation expert, Dr Tom Hart at a talk held by the Zoological Society in London last week.
Dr Hart, leading speaker at the ‘Polar Conservation and Climate Change’ lecture had just come back from a cruise in the name of science that cost £8,000.
Traditional expeditions need camping equipment and private shipping time, which can cost between £80,000 and £250,000.
Climate change: Cruise ships are the solution not the problem said Dr Tom Hart at a public lecture last week. Photo credit: Sam Pullara
“We should think of cruise ships and tourism as less of the problem and more of the solution,” said Dr Hart. Cruise ships cover more of the Antarctic than scientific bases so we might as well make that data useful, he explained.
But cheap and comfortable living quarters for researchers are not the only benefit of Antarctic tourism.
A breakthrough in technology means tourists can conduct the research by taking holiday pictures of penguin colonies in known areas.
A scanning system designed by Microsoft and University of Oxford can use the photographs to count how many chicks and adults there are in one area hundreds of times every season, not just once from a single expedition.
If we can get an idea of changes to penguin breeding habits and movements we can see how climate change is affecting them and start to make predictive analysis explained Dr Hart.
“There’s a lot we don’t know but a flexible approach. Something that is fast at reacting to climate change may be the answer,” said Dr Hart.