But that tourist traffic proved to be a lifeline for a group of travellers bobbing about on the icy waters in lifeboats after their cruise ship sank on Friday.

A Norwegian tourist vessel which also happened to be cruising through the area plucked them to safety four hours after the Canadian-chartered MV Explorer hit an iceberg, according to a report in yesterday's Guardian newspaper.

The ship's 100 passengers told Titanic jokes as they shivered in boats waiting for rescue.

'We knew there were ships not too far off,' Mr Bob Flood, a British member of the expedition team on board the Explorer, told The Times newspaper.

The drama began just before 1am.

As the Explorer was picking its way through the Antarctic sea ice, it hit what experts believe was a 'growler' - a huge iceberg shorn from the Antarctic ice shelf.

Despite the Explorer being built to withstand such conditions, the impact caused a hole in its hull and it began taking on water.

An emergency operation swung into action and, as temperatures dipped below -5 deg C, the 100 passengers and 54 crew abandoned ship and took to the sea in small open-top lifeboats.

For the next four hours - as they watched the Explorer sink - they waited for someone to come to their aid.

'There was wind and it was very cold, and we were wet because of the waves,' Ms Andrea Salas, 38, a crew member, later told a radio station in Argentina.

Eventually, the Norwegian cruiser NordNorge appeared.

Captain Arnvid Hansen said that although the passengers in the lifeboats were in good spirits when he arrived, they were cold and hungry.

'It was no problem to get them on board. They were picked up from the lifeboats... and this operation took around one hour,' he said.

They were taken to a Chilean army base on King George Island - the largest of the South Shetland Islands, close to where the accident occurred.

Among those rescued were 24 people from Britain and around 19 Americans.

They had been taking part in a 19-day tour, starting from the port of Ushuaia on the southern tip of Argentina and including the Falkland Islands and South Georgia, and had paid between US$7,000 and US$16,000 (S$23,000) each for the adventure.

Mr John Shears, of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), told The Guardian he had once been a passenger on the Explorer and that it was well equipped to deal with the challenging conditions in the Antarctic.

'I was surprised to hear what had happened. It is ice-strengthened and designed to operate down there and it runs a good safety operation,' he said.

According to climate scientists, the area where the Explorer ran into trouble is warming faster than any other part of the globe.

This led to speculation on Friday that there had been a subsequent increase in the number of icebergs breaking away from the ice shelf, making the waters increasingly dangerous for ships.

But Mr Shears said that the area's growing popularity as a tourist destination made the area safer.

The Explorer, built in 1969, is one of the best-known specialist cruise ships in the world.

It pioneered the market for Antarctic tours.