For years, one of the great adventure cruises has been a voyage to the Antarctic, generally aboard a small specialty ship (such as a retired ice-breaker) converted for expedition cruising.

But this February, one of the largest Princess cruise ships -- the Golden Princess -- will cruise among the icebergs of Antarctica for the first time with more than 2,500 passengers aboard.

They won't be roughing it, and one Golden Princess voyage -- the sole Antarctic cruise Princess plans at this point -- will bring almost half as many tourists to the Antarctic as the total number who visited the frozen region in an entire year just a decade ago.

Is this a good idea?

The ship will sail on this initial voyage to the Antarctic from Rio de Janeiro, and return after 21 days to Buenos Aires. The pathbreaking voyage thus far has not attracted a great deal of attention from environmentalists in either Brazil or Argentina.

But this heavily booked cruise by a ship 10 times bigger than most sailing to the Antarctic is engendering considerable controversy in New Zealand and Australia, as well as in the U.K., where academics contend it will change the face of tourism in one of the world's great wilderness areas.

"It will alter the whole complexion of Antarctic tourism," Alan Hemmings, a polar policy specialist at Canterbury University, told the Telegraph newspaper in London. "This will undermine the ethos of small ships and small visitor numbers."

Delegates at an international Antarctic meeting in Edinburgh in June lobbied to prohibit giant liners from the continent.

If one sank or ran aground, British delegation head Mike Richardson said, it would create an "unthinkable disaster."

"A vessel like the Golden Princess is not ice-strengthened and will be operating in a part of the world where there is poor hydrographical information," said Hemmings. "You'd have to try to rescue nearly 4,000 people."

But Princess spokesperson Julie Benson said passengers aboard the Golden Princess would "absolutely not" be exposed to any risk, and said the ship was fully equipped for the journey.