British tourists in Arctic rescued after ice from melting glacier hits their boat

Seventeen British tourists were injured when ice from a melting glacier smashed on to the deck of their luxury Arctic sightseeing boat.

Three holidaymakers were airlifted to hospital with injuries including broken arms, legs and fractured ribs after the accident which happened on Wednesday off the Svalbard islands 300 miles north of Norway.

Two of the Britons, who were taken to the Norwegian mainland, had injuries that were described as serious but not life threatening. One is understood to have suffered a head injury after the boat was tossed in the ice fall.

Four others remained in hospital on the Svalbard Islands while the remainder were back on board the Dutch-operated Alexey Maryshev. All the victims were aged between 40 and 70.

Polar travel is a booming market as concern for the state of the world's frozen wildernesses has soared. The Svalbard glacier is one of the world's smaller ice caps which makes it particularly sensitive to climate change. It has been thinning steadily since the 1930s, according to experts.

The increasingly mild weather which threatens the Arctic is making it easier to reach previously ice-bound beauty spots. However, warming has also led to greater instability among the massive glaciers that now calve with increasing frequency.

The Conservative Party leader, David Cameron, visited the Svalbard glaciers in April on a two-day trip to see the effects of climate change.

More conventional sightseers enjoy photographing the pristine shorelines and ice cliffs. Visitors are lured to the region not by the average daytime temperatures - which rarely exceed 6C in July - but in search of the extraordinary variety of wildlife. Among the star attractions are the many whales and dolphins that inhabit the crystal clear waters. Vast colonies of seabirds nest in the Arctic cliffs but most sought after is a glimpse of a polar bear - the symbol of the environmental movement.

The 50 passengers on the Alexey Maryshev, who are all British, had booked a trip through the UK specialist tour company Discover The World. A statement for the company said the ship had been near an ice shelf when a part of the glacier calved. "We understand that some of the smaller pieces of ice and water were washed on to the ship's deck and 17 passengers were injured," the statement said.

The governor of Svalbard launched an investigation into the incident. Stein Tore Pedersen, tourism adviser to the governor, said: "We are trying to interview the passengers and the captain to find out what really happened and then we will decide what to do next."

The Alexey Maryshev was built in Finland in 1990 as a research vessel for the Hydrographic Institute of St Petersburg but was converted to passenger use in the Netherlands.

Luxury liners took about 20,000 passengers ashore to various sites around Svalbard in 1997, but by 2004 that figure had risen to 40,000. The number of British tourists is rising most sharply, up threefold since 1997, from 815 to 2,065 in 2004.

Discover The World's managing director, Clive Stacey, said the ship's captain had been told to maintain a safe distance from the glacier. He told BBC Radio 4's PM programme: "The captain has very strict instructions on how close he is allowed to come to the glacier. We are at the moment investigating, as is the governor of Spitsbergen, exactly what happened and, if that's the case, why he was so close."

Professor David Vaughan, of the British Antarctic Survey, said it was not possible to say the accident was linked to global warming. "Icebergs always come away from glaciers but the problem is that they do it in a quite unpredictable way. It's very hard to look at a glacier and say when a chunk will fall off it. I would say it's impossible so one has to be very careful and not get too close," he said.