These Cruise Lines Are Turning Leisure Travelers into Citizen Scientists

02.10.2024 - 18:09 / cntraveler.com / Sylvia Earle

This story ran as part of the 2024 Readers’ Choice Awards. To find out all the winning cruises, read here.

Steam rises from the calm, gray waters surrounding Deception Island, a moody caldera in Bransfield Strait, part of the South Shetland Islands, which lie a half day's cruise from Antarctica. Its attractions include an active volcano and an extinct whaling station, but I'm standing on these dark shores for another reason: to help my fellow passengers of Aurora Expeditions' Sylvia Earle sift through grains of black sand as part of the Marine Conservation Society's Big Microplastic Survey, a project that recruits the public to collect tiny plastic samples from the world's oceans.

The expedition cruise industry has ballooned in the past five years, and citizen science has grown along with it. This lets the research community tap passenger cruise lines to gather valuable data from expensive-to-access corners of the globe at a fraction of the cost of a purpose-driven trip—and gives them hundreds of willing volunteers. I have gone on dozens of shore excursions all over the world, but none has felt fulfilling in the same way as doing work to help preserve the natural environment I've traveled here to experience. Happily, during our day combing the sands, we found no microplastics.

Lindblad Expeditions-National Geographic, which began commercial sailings to Antarctica nearly 60 years ago, has been operating for decades at the intersection of leisure travel and science with its Visiting Scientist program, which brings along environmental and climate change experts to lead research projects and give lectures. But increasingly, other kinds of cruise companies have gotten into the game, including Viking, which is traditionally known for luxury river cruises but has been voted the number one expedition line two years in a row now. In an industry first, it's contributing meteorological data to international weather models on Antarctic sailings, while both Viking and Aurora are participating in the NASA-funded FjordPhyto project, wherein guests collect phytoplankton samples so their DNA can be sequenced on board. Citizen science is even providing support during real-time events. This past Antarctic season, boutique line Quark Expeditions' work with Penguin Watch collected data on the devastating arrival of Avian Flu to to the Southern Ocean.

The impact of these programs is evident. In January 2023, Viking published its first scientific paper detailing its expedition team's encounters with the rare giant phantom jellyfish in Antarctica—spotted during submersible dives with guests. In January 2024, the first aerial survey of Antarctica's Astrolabe Island in 40 years, executed on board Viking Octantis in