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USHUAIA, TIERRA DEL FUEGO, ARGENTINA — At the 3,200-foot summit of Cerro Guanaco, west of the world's southernmost town, Ushuaia, Argentina, hikers are rewarded by spectacular views of glacier-capped peaks, frosty blue green lakes and red peat bogs. Unless, that is, they turn south. Just short of the frigid Beagle Channel that separates Tierra del Fuego from the archipelago of tiny islands that ends at Cape Horn, a new mountain is rising. Unlike the surrounding scenery, this one is made of garbage.

Ushuaia's 45,000 inhabitants are only minor contributors to the thousands of tons of waste accumulating each week. In 2007 alone, 230,000 tourists visited here, more than five times the town's population. Increasing tourism to Antarctica has brought some welcome prosperity to the region, but what tourists bring is not the problem. Rather, the problem is what they leave behind.

They come by plane and car, but a growing majority arrive in cruise ships often carrying 1,500 people or more. Most of the cruises depart from Buenos Aires and are headed to Antarctica. Ushuaia is the last stop before the frozen continent. As tourists disembark to see the sights, the ship is emptied of several tons of liquid, solid, and organic trash.

"In one week, an average cruise ship creates 210,000 gallons of sewage, 1 million gallons of gray water from showers and dishwashers, 37,000 gallons of oily bilge water and 8 tons of solid waste, including toxic waste from things like laundry and hair salons," says Danielle Fuger, who runs the international Blue Water Network's Clean Vessels Program. "A cruise ship is like a small city, and when it arrives, it's like an entire city unloading and swarming in."

All waste taken off these ships ends up in Ushuaia's dump, where it lies untreated and exposed to the elements.

"Our most serious environmental crisis is the importation of trash from the mainland," says Gustavo Lovrich, a marine scientist at Ushuaia's Southern Research Center. Everything that comes from afar on cruise ships and to support tourism never goes back, he adds. "We have no way to recycle the garbage, and it just keeps growing. Eventually, it all runs out to sea."

He worries about the town, but even more about the Beagle Channel. Named for the ship that brought Charles Darwin on his famous voyage through the region, the narrow channel is home to penguins and others sea birds, sea lions and scores of underwater species, including crab. But recent research by Southern Research Center chemist Oscar Amin shows alarming levels of heavy metals, chlorides, phosphates, polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs, and DDT in many resident species.

He's particularly concerned by PCBs. "They disrupt the immune and hormonal systems. They do not degrade, and we have no idea how this is going to affect animal populations."

As the tourists keep coming, the silent problem grows. One reason their garbage can't leave is that Tierra del Fuego is separated from the mainland by the Strait of Magellan, and is only accessible by boat or plane (cars must take a roundabout route through Chile and use a ferry). "It's too expensive to send the trash north, where they could process it," says Amin. "So the problem just gets worse, and the government doesn't do anything."

Among the threats that boats bring are pathogens from human waste. But an even bigger danger is introduction of foreign marine species hidden in garbage and ballast water.

In the early 1990s, an Asian vessel illegally discharged ballast waters in Ushuaia's harbor, releasing a toxic algae. As a result, posters throughout town warn visitors to not eat local mussels and clams. "Further contamination to the waters will affect more and more shellfish that are critical to local fishermen," says regional environmental fisheries minister Nicolás Juan Lucas. "They have already been forced farther out the channel."

As the Princess Cruise Line's Regal Princess draws near, hundreds of passengers crowd the deck to snap pictures of Ushuaia, perfectly nestled among colossal jagged peaks at the southern end of the great Andean Cordillera. These tourists will stay for only a day. But for years after they've left, their presence will be felt.