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“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.

Antarctica is understandably a bucket list destination for many, but herein lies the conundrum. The more people visit it, the more people feel a passion to protect it from human impact. And yet every person who goes there inevitably contributes to its destruction: the BBC estimates that the average carbon emissions for an Antarctic tourist are 3.76 tonnes – roughly what a person typically generates in an entire year.

But tourism has boomed in Antarctica since the 1990s. In 2019-20, 75,000 tourists went; by 2022-23, that number was 104,897. If each traveller was, in effect, melting 75 tonnes of snow just by visiting, then that adds up to almost 8m tonnes turned to slush.

Hobart is Australia’s gateway to Antarctica, and is home to the vast majority of our Antarctic and Southern Ocean scientists. Many of those scientists are roving the Hobart waterfront this week as part of Hobartica, a new element of the annual science and art festival Beaker Street.

Like many of us, Beaker Street founder Dr Margo Adler has never been to Antarctica – but she has made the deliberate choice not to go.

“I’ve always been really fascinated, but I don’t really have a good justification for going,” she says. Through Hobartica, she hopes we can get there vicariously – by immersing in the experiences of those who have been.