‘It shouldn’t be a bucket list place’: these people went to Antarctica. They hope you don’t

Dr Margo Adler says we should think of Antarctica as an incredible place ‘to protect and appreciate, but not necessarily as somewhere we need to visit’. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

“If Antarctica were music, it would be Mozart,” the Australian broadcaster Andrew Denton once wrote, after one of his many (at least seven) trips to the continent. “Art, and it would be Michelangelo. Literature, and it would be Shakespeare. And yet it is something even greater; the only place on Earth that is still as it should be. May we never tame it.”

And yet it is not as it should be: last year, Antarctic sea ice cover dropped for six months straight.