Well, travel-wise for me, I think the next big goal has to be going to space. Let’s see if that is reasonable to do by age 50. If anyone reading this is considering venturing to Antarctica, I would highly recommend it. Photos like these just can’t even do a place like that justice. While I tried to capture my views, you have to experience it for yourself.
Visiting a continent as beautiful as Antarctica really puts our planet into perspective. One day, it’s right around freezing in their summer and I’m surrounded by ageless icebergs bigger than a house. Just a couple days later, I’m out mowing my yard in 80° weather in California.
It’s also a reminder about how fragile our planet is. We have done so much to destroy our planet and it’s really taking its toll. Even when a world away from civilization, we were warned that it was important to wear sunscreen as the hole in the Ozone Layer means that there is much more direct UV exposure. We took pretty extreme precautions to make sure we weren’t bringing any foreign bacteria to land including wearing designated muck boots and making sure that we didn’t bring any food or plastic. Yet when I returned home, I read about a
whale dying from starvation and dehydration because his stomach was filled with plastic trash bags. We’ve got to do better if we want to
avoid increasing the planet’s global temperature by just 2°C, as scientists have warned is coming. We’re
already half-way to that point.
Even this trip itself definitely contributed to climate change as the unfathomable amount of CO2 generated from my plane rides and the diesel fuel of the cruise ship. The ship that we were on, the Ocean Diamond, was designated as
CarbonNeutral by having
Quark Expeditions buy carbon offset credits. That’s a start, but we can do more.
Almost every single animal that we saw relies on krill as its food in some way or another. If krill are overfished or their numbers were drastically reduced, the population of nearly all of the animals in Antarctica would crash. Harvesting of krill is becoming common in the Southern Ocean to use as food for factory fish so they get a nice pink color to them, or as ingredients in dog food or cosmetics.