Sir Edmund Hillary is best known for being the first person (along with Tenzing Norgay) to summit Mount Everest. Perhaps less known is the fact that he led the New Zealand component of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition (TAE) in 1955-58 and was the first person to arrive at the South Pole by vehicle. The Commonwealth-sponsored [...]
Frank Hurley is an icon of both Australian documentary photography and Antarctic exploration. Hurley was an exceptional photographer and his six visits to Antarctica covered a substantial part of the heroic age of Antarctic exploration. His striking images of Shackleton’s ill-fated Endurance expedition are some of the most famous images of Antarctic exploration. Hurley began [...]
Hjalmar Johansen participated in Roald Amundsen’s Antarctic expedition 1910-1912 and accompanied Fridtjof Nansen on his attempted dash to the North Pole in 1895. The Arctic with Nansen Hjalmar Johansen was Norwegian champion in gymnastics at 20 and was famous for his strength and acrobatics. He applied to join Fridtjof Nansen’s drift across the Arctic Ocean [...]
Maria Klenova was a Russian and Soviet marine geologist and one of the founders of Russian marine science. Klenova spent nearly 30 years researching the polar regions. She was the first woman scientist to do research in Antarctica and was a contributor to the first Soviet Antarctic atlas. Early Life and Career Maria Klenova was [...]
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 [...]