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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Jackie Ronne was the first American woman to set foot on Antarctica. She and Jennie Darlington were the first women to overwinter in Antarctica, as members of the Ronne Antarctic Research Expedition (RARE).
Robert F. Scott was a British Royal Navy officer and explorer who led two expeditions to the Antarctic regions: the Discovery Expedition (1901–1904) and the ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition (1910–1913). On the first Antarctic expedition, Scott set a new southern record by marching to latitude 82°S and discovered the Polar (Antarctic) Plateau, on which the [...]
Ernest Shackleton was one of the most celebrated explorers of the Heroic Age. He led the 1907-09 Nimrod Antarctic expedition, which pioneered a route to the South Pole and reached latitude 88° 23'. His return to Antarctica in 1914 was intended to achieve the first trans-Antarctic crossing, but instead resulted in a dramatic story of [...]
Captain Frank Arthur Worsley (1872-1943) New Zealander Frank Worsley captained the Endurance during Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. He is best remembered for navigating the expedition party to safety after the Endurance was crushed by ice floes in the Weddell Sea. Worsley also took part in Shackleton’s final expedition to the Antarctic in 1922. [...]