Meet the Legends of Antarctic Exploration
Carl Anton Larsen was a whaling pioneer, ship’s captain and inadvertent scientist. He is known for discovering the Larsen Ice Shelf and other features on the Graham Land Coast, as well as for the whaling station he built at Grytviken, South Georgia. Early Life Carl Anton Larsen was the son of a Norwegian Sea Captain. At [...]
Mikhail Lazarev was a Russian naval officer and explorer. Lazarev took part in the discovery of Antarctica and numerous islands, as a commander of the ship Mirnyi and Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen’s deputy, on the 1819–1821 Russian naval expedition. The expedition circumnavigated Antarctica; was the first to cross the Antarctic circle since Captain Cook in [...]
General (R) Javier Lopetegui Torres spent more than 35 years immersed in Antarctic matters. Don Javier was a quiet and modest man. One might never suspect that he was responsible for furthering Chilean science deep in Antarctica and in many ways for the very existence of ALE. In the early 1980’s, Lopetegui, a former pilot and Antarctic [...]
Dr. Alexander Macklin was one of two surgeons on Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic (Endurance) Expedition 1914-1917. He also joined Shackleton on his final expedition aboard the Quest from 1921-22. Early Life Alexander Macklin was born in India, where his father was a doctor. The family returned home to England and settled in the Scilly Isles, [...]
Douglas Mawson is one of Australia’s best-known Antarctic explorers. Born in England but raised in Australia, he gained degrees in mining engineering and geology and became a lecturer in minerology and petrology at the University of Adelaide in 1906. He explored particularly hostile regions of East Antarctica, and contributed much to scientific understanding of the [...]
Xavier Mertz was a Swiss explorer from Basel. He took part in the Far Eastern Party, a 1912–13 sledging journey of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition (AAE), which claimed his life. The Mertz Glacier is named after him. As a young man, Mertz studied law and science, specialising in glacier and mountain formations. Mertz was an [...]
Chester William Nimitz, Sr. was a fleet admiral of the United States Navy. As Chief of Naval Operations 1945-47, Nimitz was instrumental in the approval and deployment of the Operation Highjump, the largest Antarctic expedition ever organized. Naval Career and World War II Nimitz was appointed to the Navy in 1901 and served in both [...]
Otto Nordenskjöld, a Swedish geologist and academic, came from a prominent family of scientists, explorers and humanitarians. He was one of the first geographers with a scholarly background to explore and research in Antarctica.
Captain Lawrence “Titus” Oates was a British army officer, and later an Antarctic explorer, who accompanied Captain Robert Scott to the South Pole during the Terra Nova Expedition. On the return journey Oates, afflicted with gangrene and frostbite, walked from his tent into a blizzard, hoping to improve his companions’ chances of survival. Early Life [...]
Nathaniel B. Palmer was an American seal hunter, explorer, sailing captain, and ship designer, after whom Palmer Land, a stretch of western Antarctic coast and islands, is named. Sealing and Antarctic Discoveries Young Nat played in his father’s Stonington, CT shipyard, went to sea at the age of 14, and by age 16 was in [...]