Antarctica is the coldest, driest and windiest continent on Earth, and the last to be discovered by humans. The story of how it was found and explored stretches from the speculation of ancient Greek philosophers to the heroic dog-sled expeditions of the early 20th century, and it is filled with rivalries, tragedies and survival stories that still capture the imagination today. This article walks through the key moments in the discovery and early exploration of Antarctica.
The Ancient Idea of a Southern Continent
The ancient Greeks, including Pythagoras and Plato, intuited the presence of a great landmass in the south, a continent that would “balance” the lands of the northern hemisphere. They called this hypothetical land Terra Australis Incognita, the “unknown southern land”. The geographer Ptolemy reinforced the idea in the 2nd century AD, and European mapmakers continued to draw a vast southern continent on their maps for the next 1,500 years, even though no one had ever seen it.
For centuries the idea remained pure theory. Sailors who ventured into the Southern Ocean reported only icy seas and the occasional rocky island. More concrete evidence of an actual southern continent did not appear until the eighteenth century.
Captain Cook and the First Crossings of the Antarctic Circle
The British navigator Captain James Cook became the first person known to cross the Antarctic Circle, on 17 January 1773. On his second great voyage of exploration, aboard HMS Resolution, Cook reached 71 degrees 10 minutes south, the furthest south anyone had sailed at that stage, without ever sighting land. He did, however, sail close enough to the Antarctic ice pack to recognise that something significant lay beyond it. On a later voyage in 1775, Cook sighted South Georgia and reasoned that all the ice spread across the Southern Ocean must come from a landmass still closer to the Pole.
Cook’s reports of seal-rich waters around the southern islands also opened the door to commercial sealing and whaling, which would drive much of the early exploration of the region over the next half-century.
The Subantarctic Islands and the Sealers
Long before anyone set foot on the continent, the ring of subantarctic islands scattered across the Southern Ocean were the stepping stones south. They lie north of the Antarctic Convergence, the line where cold polar water meets the warmer north, and Cook’s reports of seal-rich waters around them sent hunters racing to the south, whose trade drove much of the early exploration.
- South Georgia: the largest and most important, a glacier-spined island that became the hub of southern whaling. The Norwegian captain Carl Anton Larsen founded the Grytviken whaling station there in 1904, and it ran until 1965. Shackleton died on the island at the start of his final expedition and is buried at Grytviken, where his right-hand man Frank Wild now lies beside him; their graves are the most visited spot in the far south.
- Kerguelen: the French Desolation Islands, among the most isolated places on earth, a treeless archipelago thousands of kilometres from any continent and now home to a French research base.
- Heard Island: an Australian territory crowned by Big Ben, an active volcano whose summit, Mawson Peak at 2,750 metres, is the highest Australian ground outside the mainland.
- Macquarie and the rest: Macquarie Island between New Zealand and Antarctica, with the Crozet, Prince Edward and Auckland groups, complete a chain that the sealers stripped of fur and elephant seals within a few decades.
These islands carry extraordinary wildlife, the king penguin colonies, albatrosses and seals covered in our guide to the fauna of Antarctica, and they remain the gateway through which expedition ships still approach the continent, as our overview of Antarctica cruises from Ushuaia describes.
The First Sighting of Antarctica
Antarctica itself was finally sighted in January 1820. Three different expeditions claim a part in the discovery, all within the same few months:
- The Russian explorer Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen, leading the imperial expedition aboard the ships Vostok and Mirny, sighted the ice shelf of what is now known as the Princess Martha Coast on 27 January 1820.
- The Royal Navy officer Edward Bransfield, accompanied by the Irish-born sealer William Smith, sighted the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula on 30 January 1820.
- The American sealer Nathaniel Palmer sighted the same peninsula in November of the same year.
The American sealer John Davis probably made the first landing on the Antarctic mainland, at Hughes Bay on the Antarctic Peninsula, on 7 February 1821. His achievement remained largely unknown until his ship’s log was rediscovered in 1952. It was not until 1895 that a whaling party that included Carsten Borchgrevink, a Norwegian who had migrated to Australia at the age of 24, made the first undisputed landing on the Antarctic continent at Cape Adare.
Mapping the Australian Sector of Antarctica
What was to become the Australian sector of Antarctica was not sighted until John Biscoe, an English sealer and explorer, discovered the area he named Enderby Land in 1831. Biscoe was the third person known to circumnavigate Antarctica and added significantly to the maps of the era.
The territory was joined soon after by Kemp Land, discovered by Peter Kemp aboard the Magnet in 1833, and Wilkes Land, named after the American explorer Charles Wilkes, who discovered it in 1840 during the United States Exploring Expedition. Together these vast regions form the cornerstone of the Australian Antarctic Territory, one of the largest claims on the continent today.
Around the same time, the French explorer Jules Dumont d’Urville sighted the coast he named Adelie Land (after his wife Adele) in January 1840, also adding his country’s claim to the southern landmass. The race for Antarctic territory had begun.
The Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration
The next stage of Antarctic history is known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, a period that runs roughly from 1897 to 1922. The era marked the sheer number of hazardous expeditions undertaken by various countries, including Australia, in the effort to map this previously uncharted territory. Around 17 major expeditions from 10 different nations took part during this 25-year window, and many of the most famous stories of polar exploration come from this period.
The first group to spend the winter south of the Antarctic Circle was the Belgian Antarctic Expedition under Adrien de Gerlache from 1898 to 1899. His ship, the Belgica, was trapped in the ice off the Antarctic Peninsula and remained there, slowly drifting westwards with the pack-ice, for a further 13 months. Among the crew were two men whose names would become forever associated with the South and North Poles respectively: first mate Roald Amundsen and ship’s surgeon Frederick Cook. Borchgrevink subsequently led the British Antarctic Expedition (on which all but three of its members were Norwegian) during the first winter ever spent ashore in Antarctica, at Cape Adare in 1899.
Robert Falcon Scott and the Discovery Expedition
The British Royal Navy sent Robert Falcon Scott south on the Discovery Expedition from 1901 to 1904. Scott, accompanied by Ernest Shackleton and Edward Wilson, set a new “furthest south” record at 82 degrees 17 minutes south on 30 December 1902. The expedition also carried out extensive scientific research in geology, biology and meteorology, and laid the groundwork for the better-equipped expeditions that followed.
The Race to the South Pole
This period saw several attempts in the famous race to be the first to reach the South Pole. Ernest Shackleton, a member of Scott’s first expedition, returned later as leader of the British Antarctic (Nimrod) Expedition in 1908. This team came within 180 km (112 miles) of the goal before they were forced to turn back. Shackleton later said he chose to retreat because he preferred a live donkey to a dead lion. Some of the party, T. W. Edgeworth David, Douglas Mawson and Alistair Mackay, became the first people to reach the South Magnetic Pole in early 1909, an extraordinary feat in its own right.
Scott and his companions reached the true South Pole on their second expedition, the Terra Nova Expedition, begun in 1910. On 17 January 1912 they discovered to their dismay that Roald Amundsen had beaten them. Amundsen reached the Pole a month earlier, on 14 December 1911, leaving behind a tent, a Norwegian flag and a letter for Scott.
The Norwegian success came down to careful preparation. Amundsen used skis and dog sleds, ate fresh meat from the dogs themselves and chose a shorter route from the Bay of Whales. Scott, by contrast, relied on a mix of ponies, motor sledges and man-hauled sleds, all of which failed in the brutal conditions. On the return trek the team weakened fast. Edgar Evans died first after a fall; then Captain Lawrence Oates, frostbitten and certain he was slowing the others, walked out of the tent into a blizzard to die, with the words his companions wrote down: “I am just going outside and may be some time.” Scott and his two remaining men died in their tent only a few kilometres short of a supply depot, defeated by exhaustion, frostbite, malnutrition and a run of unusually severe blizzards. Scott kept his journal to the last, closing his message to the public with the line “For God’s sake look after our people.” Their bodies, diaries and photographs were found by a search party eight months later and turned them into legendary figures of polar exploration.
Mawson and the Australasian Antarctic Expedition
In the same year, another extraordinary feat of heroism became necessary when the 1911 to 1914 Australasian Antarctic Expedition, led by Douglas Mawson, ran into serious trouble. The expedition had set up its base at Cape Denison in Commonwealth Bay, the windiest place on Earth at sea level, with average wind speeds of around 80 km/h and gusts that exceeded 300 km/h.
On a sledging journey deep into the interior, Belgrave Ninnis fell down a crevasse along with the party’s tent, spare clothes, most of the food and the best dogs. Mawson and Xavier Mertz turned back to trek the 500 km (310 miles) to their base. They had to travel slowly, killing the weakest dog to feed the others and themselves.
Mertz died within a week from vitamin A poisoning, a consequence of eating husky livers. Very weak, frostbitten and also suffering from the same poison that had killed his companion, Mawson sawed his sled in half to lighten his load and faced the last 160 km (99 miles) alone. At one point he fell into a crevasse himself and hung suspended on his harness above the void before slowly hauling himself back to the surface.
He arrived at Cape Denison just in time to see the departure of his supply ship, the Aurora. Despite contacting the ship by radio, the crew was unable to return because of the worsening weather, and Mawson, together with the six men who had stayed behind to wait for him, had to settle in for a second full year in Antarctica. His survival counts as one of the greatest stories of endurance in the history of polar exploration, and his huts at Cape Denison remain remarkably preserved to this day as a heritage site of international significance.
Shackleton and the Endurance Expedition
With the South Pole already reached, Shackleton turned his attention to a new goal: crossing the entire Antarctic continent from coast to coast. His Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, launched in 1914, became one of the most famous survival stories in history.
His ship, the Endurance, was crushed in the ice of the Weddell Sea after being trapped for nine months. After a further five months camped on the drifting ice, the crew took to the ship’s boats and made it to Elephant Island, a remote and uninhabited rock in the Southern Ocean. Leaving the bulk of the party behind under the command of Frank Wild, Shackleton and a small group continued on to South Georgia in the open lifeboat James Caird, an astonishing journey of 1,290 km (800 miles) across some of the roughest seas on Earth.
Two weeks later they arrived, but they landed on the wrong side of the island, which made a crossing of its mountainous and unmapped interior necessary. Shackleton, Tom Crean and Frank Worsley became the first people ever to do so, in a 36-hour climb across glaciers and peaks with only basic equipment. They eventually found help at the whaling station at Stromness Bay and were able to mount a rescue.
After four attempts, Shackleton finally returned to Elephant Island in August 1916 to find all 22 crew still alive after 105 days camped beneath the upturned ship’s boats. Not a single member of the expedition died. The story of the Endurance stays one of the most celebrated survival epics in human history. The wreck itself was finally rediscovered on the floor of the Weddell Sea in March 2022 by the Endurance22 expedition, almost perfectly preserved after more than a century beneath the ice, with the ship’s name still legible on the stern.
The End of the Heroic Age
The Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration is generally considered to have ended with the death of Ernest Shackleton in 1922, who suffered a fatal heart attack aboard his ship at South Georgia at the start of his final expedition. By that time, the broad outlines of Antarctica had been mapped, the South Pole had been conquered and the major coastal regions had been claimed by various nations.
The era that followed saw the introduction of aircraft, radio and motorised vehicles, which transformed Antarctic exploration from a test of human endurance into a more scientific enterprise. Richard E. Byrd of the United States Navy made the first flight over the South Pole in 1929, and large-scale scientific bases were established during the International Geophysical Year of 1957 to 1958, which led directly to the Antarctic Treaty of 1959.
Visiting the Explorers Huts Today
The most striking legacy of the Heroic Age is that you can still walk into it. The wooden bases the explorers left behind survive almost intact in the dry, freezing air, shelves stacked with hundred-year-old tins, clothing, sledges and laboratory gear left exactly as the men walked away from them.
- Scott’s huts: the small Discovery hut at Hut Point from 1901 to 1904, and the larger Terra Nova hut at Cape Evans from 1910 to 1913, the latter also used by Shackleton’s stranded Ross Sea party.
- Shackleton’s Nimrod hut at Cape Royds, built for fifteen men in 1908, with cases of provisions still stacked against its walls.
- Borchgrevink’s hut at Cape Adare, the oldest building on the continent, left by the first party to winter ashore in 1899.
- Mawson’s Huts at Cape Denison in Commonwealth Bay, hammered by the windiest sea-level weather on earth and listed as a national heritage site.
The Ross Sea huts have been conserved since 1987 by the New Zealand based Antarctic Heritage Trust, and Mawson’s by the Mawson’s Huts Foundation with the Australian Antarctic Division. Reaching any of them means an expedition voyage of around thirty days into the Ross Sea or Commonwealth Bay, with no flights and landings only when ice and weather allow. The more accessible Antarctic Peninsula and South Georgia, where Shackleton’s grave stands at Grytviken, feature on most Antarctica cruises from Ushuaia.
The Legacy of the Heroic Age
The names of Bellingshausen, Bransfield, Borchgrevink, Amundsen, Scott, Mawson and Shackleton stay synonymous with discovery, sacrifice and the unbreakable spirit of exploration. Their journeys, made with wooden ships, woollen clothing and dog sleds, set the standard for endurance against which every later expedition has been measured.
Their legacy lives on in the scientific bases that now operate across the continent, in the books and films that retell their stories and in the Antarctic Treaty itself, which protects the continent for peaceful and scientific purposes. Many of the original huts built by Scott, Shackleton and Mawson still stand on the icy coast as protected historic sites, frozen in time and preserved by the cold dry air just as they were left more than a century ago. They remain one of the most powerful reminders of an era when reaching the bottom of the world meant risking everything.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who discovered Antarctica?
No single person discovered Antarctica. James Cook first crossed the Antarctic Circle in 1773 without sighting land. The continent itself was first seen in January 1820 by three expeditions within weeks of each other: the Russian Fabian von Bellingshausen, the Briton Edward Bransfield, and the American sealer Nathaniel Palmer. The first confirmed landing came later, in 1895.
Who reached the South Pole first?
The Norwegian Roald Amundsen reached the South Pole first, on 14 December 1911, using skis and dog sleds. The British party under Robert Falcon Scott arrived about five weeks later, on 17 January 1912, to find Amundsen’s tent and flag already there, and died on the return journey.
What was the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration?
The Heroic Age runs roughly from 1897 to 1922, when around seventeen major expeditions from ten nations raced to map the continent and reach the Pole using wooden ships, dog sleds and man-hauling. It produced the famous stories of Scott, Amundsen, Mawson and Shackleton, and ended with Shackleton’s death in 1922.
Has Shackleton’s ship Endurance been found?
Yes. The Endurance, crushed by pack ice in the Weddell Sea in 1915, was rediscovered on the seabed in 2022 by the Endurance22 expedition, almost perfectly preserved more than three kilometres down, with the ship’s name still legible on the stern.
Where is Shackleton buried?
Ernest Shackleton is buried at Grytviken on the subantarctic island of South Georgia, where he died of a heart attack in 1922 at the start of his last expedition. The ashes of his close companion Frank Wild were later interred beside him.
What protects Antarctica today?
The Antarctic Treaty, signed in 1959 and in force since 1961, sets the continent aside for peace and science and suspends all territorial claims. The science and resource questions it governs are covered in our piece on research and exploitation on Antarctica, and the land itself in our physical geography of Antarctica.
Sources and Further Reading
- Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge
- British Antarctic Survey
- Australian Antarctic Division
- Royal Geographical Society
- Antarctic Treaty Secretariat
