History of Antarctica - Exploration

Exploration

Only slightly more than a year later, the first landing on the Antarctic mainland was arguably by the American Captain John Davis, a sealer, who claimed to have set foot there on 7 February 1821, though this is not accepted by all historians.

In December 1821, Nathaniel Palmer, an American sealer looking for seal breeding grounds, sighted what is now known as the Antarctic Peninsula, located in the continent's northwestern quadrant. In 1823, James Weddell, a British sealer, sailed into what is now known as the Weddell Sea.

The first person to realize that he had actually discovered a whole continent was Charles Wilkes, the commander of a United States Navy expedition. His 1840 voyage discovered what is now known as Wilkes Land, on the southeast quadrant of the continent.

After the North Magnetic Pole was located in 1831, explorers and scientists began looking for the South Magnetic Pole. One of the explorers, James Clark Ross, a British naval officer, identified its approximate location, but was unable to reach it on his trip in 1841. Commanding the British ships Erebus and Terror, he braved the pack ice and approached what is now known as the Ross Ice Shelf, a massive floating ice shelf over 100 feet (30 m) high. His expedition sailed eastward along the southern Antarctic coast discovering mountains which were since named after his ships: Mount Erebus, the most active volcano on Antarctica, and Mount Terror.

The first documented landing on the mainland of East Antarctica was at Victoria Land by the American sealer Mercator Cooper on 26 January 1853.

In 1897, an expedition led by Belgian Adrian de Gerlache left Antwerp, Belgium for Antarctica. The multi-national crew included a Romanian zoologist (Emil Racoviţă), a Polish geologist (Henryk Arctowski), a Belgian navigator/astronomer (George Lecointe), several Norwegians, including Roald Amundsen, and an American surgeon, Dr. Frederick Cook. In 1898, they became the first men to spend winter on Antarctica, when their ship Belgica became trapped in the ice. They became stuck on 28 February 1898, and only managed to get out of the ice on 14 March 1899. During their forced stay, several men lost their sanity, not only because of the Antarctic winter night and the endured hardship, but also because of the language problems between the different nationalities. A year later a British expedition commanded by Norwegian Carsten Borchgrevink became the first to intentionally spend winter on the continent itself. These expeditions marked the start of the era called the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.