- Roald Amundsen
Roald Engelbregt Gravning Amundsen was a Norwegian explorer of polar regions. He led the first successful Antarctic expedition to the South Pole between 1910 and 1912. He disappeared in June 1928 while taking part in a rescue mission. With Douglas Mawson, Robert Falcon Scott, and Ernest Shackleton, Amundsen was a key expedition leader during the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.
- Robert Falcon Scott
Captain Robert Falcon Scott, CVO, RN, (6 June 1868 - 29 March 1912) was a Royal Naval officer and Antarctic explorer. In the so-called "Race to the South Pole" Scott came second, behind the Norwegian Roald Amundsen; he and his four companions died whilst trying to return to their base. Scott has become the most famous, and tragic, hero of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.
- James Clark Ross
Sir James Clark Ross (April 15, 1800 - April 3, 1862), was a British naval officer and explorer. He explored the Arctic with his uncle Sir John Ross and Sir William Parry, and later led his own expedition to Antarctica. Ross was born in London. He entered the navy in 1812 under John Ross, whom he accompanied on his first Arctic voyage in search of a Northwest Passage in 1818. Between 1819 and 1827 he took part in four Arctic expeditions under Parry, …
- Frans Lanting
Frans Lanting, (born 1951) was born in Rotterdam and is a Dutch nature photographer specializing in wildlife photography. Lanting emigrated to the United States after being educated in the Netherlands. He now lives in Santa Cruz, California and operates a studio and gallery, as well as a stock photography services. Lanting's wife Chris Eckstrom is a writer, editor, producer, and works on joint books of nature photography.
- Frank Hurley
James Francis "Frank" Hurley (15 October 1885 - 17 January 1962) was an Australian photographer, film maker and adventurer. He participated in a number of expeditions to Antarctica and served as an official photographer with Australian forces during both world wars. His artistic style produced many memorable images but he also used staged scenes, …
- Michael Collins
Michael Collins (born 1964) is an Irish-born author of novels and short stories. The film rights to several of his books have been purchased, and he has also written a screenplay titled "Julia". He was born in Tipperary, Ireland and is a distant relative of the Irish patriot Michael Collins. He grew up in Ireland, where he was a distance runner.
- Will Steger
Will Steger (born 1943 at Richfield, Minnesota) is a prominent spokesperson for the understanding and preservation of the Arctic and has led some of the most significant feats in dogsled exploration; such as the first confirmed dogsled journey to the North Pole (without re-supply) in 1986, the 1,600-mile south-north traverse of Greenland - the longest unsupported dogsled expedition in history during 1988, …
- John Davis
Captain John Davis was a seal hunter from Connecticut who claimed to have set foot on Antarctica on February 7, 1821. Davis and his crew from the American sealing ship, "Cecilia", claim to have landed at Hughes Bay (64°01'S) looking for seals for less than an hour. The coastal strip where the men were alleged to have gone ashore is called Davis Coast.
- Lynne Cox
Lynne Cox is an American long-distance open-water swimmer and writer. In 1971 she and her teammates were the first group of teenagers to complete the crossing of the Catalina Island Channel in California. She has twice held the record for the fastest crossing (men or women) of the English Channel (1972 and 1973). In 1975, Cox became the first woman to swim the 10°C (50°F), 16 km (10 mi) Cook Strait in New Zealand.
- William Smith
William Smith was the English captain who discovered the South Shetland Islands, an archipelago near Antarctica. In 1819, while sailing cargo on "Williams" from Buenos Aires to Valparaíso, he sailed further south round Cape Horn in an attempt of catching the right winds. On 19 February 1819 he spotted the new land at 62° West but did not land on it. The naval authorities did not believe his discovery, …
- Apsley Cherry-Garrard
Apsley George Benet Cherry-Garrard (January 2, 1886 - May 18, 1959) was an English explorer of Antarctica.
- Piri Reis
Piri Reis (full name Hadji Muhiddin Piri Ibn Hadji Mehmed was an Ottoman-Turkish admiral and cartographer born between 1465 and 1470 in Gallipoli on the Aegean coast of Turkey. He is primarily known today for his maps and charts collected in his "Kitab-ı Bahriye" ("Book of Navigation"), …
- Richard Alley
Dr. Richard B. Alley (1957-present) is an American geologist and Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences at the Pennsylvania State University. He has authored more than 170 refereed scientific publications about the relationships between Earth's cryosphere and global climate change and is recognized by the Institute for Scientific Information as a "highly cited researcher." In 1999, Dr. Alley was invited to testify about climate change by Vice President Al Gore, …
- Robert Bindschadler
Dr. Robert Bindschadler is a senior fellow at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and has been an active field researcher in the Antarctic for over 25 years. He is a past president of the International Glaciological Society, chairs the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Initiative, is an editor for the Journal of Glaciology and has led 14 expeditions to Antarctica and has participated in numerous other expeditions around the world including Greenland.
- Vivian Fuchs
Sir Vivian Ernest Fuchs FRS (February 11, 1908 - November 11, 1999) was an English explorer whose expeditionary team completed the first overland crossing of Antarctica in 1958.
- Conrad Anker
Conrad Anker (born in 1963) is an American rock climber, mountaineer, and author famous for his challenging ascents in the high Himalaya and Antarctica. He is a member of The North Face climbing team. In 1999 he was a key member of the search team which located the remains of legendary British climber George Mallory on Mount Everest. He lives in Bozeman, Montana.
- Peter Doran
Peter Doran, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Doran was the lead author of a research paper about Antarctic temperatures that was published in the journal "Nature" in January 2002. Because he and his colleagues found that some parts of Antarctica had cooled between 1986 and 2000, his paper has been frequently cited by opponents of the global warming theory, …
- Greg Rucka
Gregory Rucka (born November 29, 1969) is an American writer of novels and comic books. He is married to fellow comic writer Jen Van Meter. His writing career began with his Atticus Kodiak series. Kodiak is a bodyguard whose jobs are rarely as uncomplicated as they at first appear. The series to date consists of: "Keeper", "Finder", "Smoker", "Shooting at Midnight", and "Critical Space".
- Dick Smith
Dick Smith AO (born Richard Harold Smith on 18 March 1944, is an Australian businessman and aviator. He is commonly known for his qualities as an Australian patriot, and philanthropist. He gained his amateur radio licence at the age of 17 and holds callsign VK2DIK. In 1968, he founded a small electronics retailer Dick Smith Electronics. In 1982, he sold the business to Woolworths for $25 million, …
- Kelly Tyler-Lewis
In 2002, Kelly Tyler-Lewis was a participant in the National Science Foundation Artists and Writers Program in Antarctica for two months, traveling to locales frequented by the Ross Sea party and interviewing scientists whose research illuminates the historic events. Research for the book also took her to Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. From 2002 to 2004, she was a visiting scholar of the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge.
- Lincoln Ellsworth
Lincoln Ellsworth (May 12, 1880 - May 26, 1951) was a U.S. explorer. Son of James Ellsworth and Eva Frances Butler, he was born in Chicago, Illinois. He also lived in Hudson, Ohio as a child. Lincoln Ellsworth's father, James, a wealthy coal man from the United States, spent $100,000US to fund Roald Amundsen's venture from Norway to the North Pole in 1925. Ellsworth was a pilot for this trip.
- Nathaniel Palmer
Nathaniel Brown Palmer (1799 - 1877) was a seal hunter, explorer, sailing captain, and ship designer. He was born in Stonington, Connecticut. During the 1810s the skins of Antarctic Ocean seals were highly valued as items for trade with China. As a skilled and fearless seal hunter, Palmer achieved his first command at the age of only 21. His vessel was a diminutive sloop named the "Hero", only 47 feet (14 meters) in length.
- Bill Manhire
Professor Bill Manhire CNZM, (born in Invercargill in 1946) is an award-winning New Zealand poet and short story writer. His work has won the New Zealand Book Awards poetry prize five times, in 1978, 1985, 1992,1996 and his most recent work "Lifted" received the 2006 Montana New Zealand Book Awards Poetry Prize. Manhire has been a strong promoter of local poetry and other writing, acting as editor of several compilations of New Zealand short stories, …
- Phillip Law
Phil was the founder of the Australian Antarctic Division, which he ran until 1966. During this time he oversaw the mapping of 6000 kilometres of Antarctic coastline and more than 1.3 million square kilometres of new territory. In January 1988 he joined us on a historical visit to Mawson Station, which he established. In November 2000, we were honoured that he was able to accompany us once more, this time to visit South Georgia.
- James Weddell
James Weddell (August 24, 1787 - September 9, 1834) was an English navigator, sealer, and explorer of the antarctic.
- Henryk Arctowski
Henryk Arctowski (1871 - 1958) was a Polish scientist, oceanographer and Antarctica's explorer. His name has been given to a phenomenon in which a halo resembling a rainbow, with two other partial arcs symmetrical to the main one, forms around the sun as light is refracted through ice crystals in the atmosphere.
- Judy Morris
Judy Morris (born 1947 in Queensland, Australia) is an Australian actor, film director and screenwriter, well known for the variety of roles she played in 54 different television shows and films, but most recently for co-writing a musical epic about the life of penguins in Antarctica which became "Happy Feet", Australia's largest animated film project to date.
- Rosie Thomas
Rosie Thomas is a writer, currently living in London. Her numerous novels, several of them top ten bestsellers, deal with the common themes of love and loss. She is a keen traveller and mountaineer who has climbed in both the Alps and the Himalayas. She has also competed in the Peking to Paris car rally and spent time at a Bulgarian research station in Antarctica.
- Edward Bransfield
Edward Bransfield (1785 - 1852) was a master in the Royal Navy and arguably the discoverer of the continent of Antarctica.
- Mike Stroud
Dr Mike Stroud (born 17 April 1955) is an expert on human health under extreme conditions. He became widely known when he partnered Ranulph Fiennes on polar expeditions. Stroud was educated at Trinity School of John Whitgift in the London Borough of Croydon. He obtained a degree (intercalated BSc) from University College London in anthropology and genetics in 1976, before qualifying as a medical doctor at University College Hospital, London in 1979.
- Edgeworth David
Sir Tannatt William Edgeworth David KBE, F.R.S., (28 January 1858 - 28 August 1934) was a Welsh-born Australian geologist and Antarctic explorer.
- Tim Naish
Tim Naish is a glaciologist. He is the Associate Professor and Deputy Director, of the Antarctic Research Centre. He wrote about the collapse of Antarctica's Larsen B ice shelf. In 2002, between January 31 and March 7 the Larsen B ice shelf collapsed and broke up. Tim Naish warned that the ice shelf of Weddell Sea is imperiled, and if the temperature rises by 3 °C, the ice shelves of Antarctica will become thinner. “These are dramatic changes” – said Tim Naish.
- Pascal Lee
Pascal Lee is chairman and co-founder of the Mars Institute, a planetary scientist with the SETI Institute, and the Principal Investigator of NASA's Haughton-Mars Project (HMP). In conjunction with his role with HMP, he has travelled to the Arctic to conduct studies using Devon Island as a Martian analog. Lee has also participated in several planetary flyby missions.
- Gabriel de Castilla
Gabriel de Castilla, was a Spanish explorer and navigator. A native of Palencia, he was an early explorer of Antarctica. His contribution to knowledge of the Antarctic continent was ignored in his lifetime and long afterwards. It was only at the end of the 18th century that his contributions were recognized.
- Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen
Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen (September 20, 1778-January 13, 1852) served as a naval officer of the Russian Empire and commanded the second Russian expedition to circumnavigate the globe. During this expedition Bellingshausen became one of three Europeans to first see the continent of Antarctica.
- John Biscoe
John Biscoe (June 28, 1794 - 1843) was an English mariner and explorer who commanded the first expedition known to sight the areas called Enderby Land and Graham Land along the coast of Antarctica. The expedition also found a number of islands in the vicinity of Graham Land, including the Biscoe Islands that were named after him.
- Rosie Stancer
Rosie Stancer (b.1960) is a polar adventurer who since 1996 has embarked on major polar expeditions of increasing severity and commitment. In 1997 Rosie was one of 20 amateur women who were selected for a place on the first all women’s expedition to the North Pole, The 'McVities Penguin Polar Relay'. A relay of five teams hauled sleds of up to 150lbs across 500 miles of shifting pack ice in temperatures down to minus 40ºc.
- Lars Christensen
Lars Christensen was a Norwegian shipowner and whaling magnate with a keen interest in the exploration of Antarctica. Christensen was born into a wealthy family. He inherited his whaling fleet from his rich father, Commander Christen Christensen.
- Jules Dumont D'Urville
Rear Admiral Jules Sébastien César Dumont d'Urville was a French explorer and naval officer, who explored the south and western Pacific, Australia, New Zealand, and Antarctica.
- George Hubert Wilkins
Sir George Hubert Wilkins MC and bar (October 31, 1888 - November 30, 1958) was an Australian polar explorer, pilot, soldier, geographer and photographer. Wilkins was a native of Hallett, South Australia, the last of 13 children in a family of pioneer settlers and sheep farmers. As a teenager, he moved to Adelaide where he found work with a traveling cinema, and thence to England where he became a pioneering aerial photographer whilst working for Gaumont Studios.