The Final Frontier: Conquering the Arctic and Southern Oceans

The Arctic Ocean and the Southern Ocean were the two last oceans to be explored by Europeans and, in the latter case, by any human beings. Indigenous peoples—Inuit, Aleut, and Native American—had reached the north polar region possibly thousands of years ago. The Arctic region was not totally unknown to early European explorers either. The Greek Pytheas may have visited Iceland in 330 BCE, and we have already seen how the Vikings explored the North Atlantic, including Iceland and Greenland, about 1,000 years ago. The sixteenth century saw a flurry of European attempts to explore the Arctic. English explorers such as Sir Martin Frobisher (c. 1535-94), John Davis (c. 1550-605), and Henry Hudson (c. 1565-c. 611) attempted to discover a northwest passage through the Canadian Arctic islands that would link Europe with Asia.

The Dutch explorer Willem Barentsz (1550-97) made three voyages in search of a northeast passage, with the same goal of linking Europe with Asia, but along the northern coast of Russia instead. Finding a shortcut through either a Northwest or Northeast Passage became an obsession of English, Dutch, and Russian explorers. These passages do indeed exist, but are usually so clogged with ice as to make them impracticable as trade routes. The search for a Northwest Passage continued to lure the English into the Arctic even in the nineteenth century, when explorers such as John Franklin (1786-847) and John Ross (1777-856) continued exploring. The Northwest Passage was finally identified by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen (1872-928) in the early twentieth century. Russians such as Vitus Bering (1681-741) explored the Northeast Passage in the eighteenth century along its entire length, and in 1940 the Germans successfully used a Northeast Passage transit to move a ship between Europe and the South Pacific.

The Arctic Ocean is a body of water centered at the North Pole and almost surrounded by the landmasses of Europe, Asia, and North America. The only openings to other oceans are to the Atlantic between Scandinavia and Greenland and narrowly between Greenland and North America, and from the Arctic Ocean to the Pacific through the Bering Strait. Much of the Arctic Ocean is continually covered by ice, with some areas covered by ice only part of the year. This makes exploration by ship difficult, but not entirely impossible. Later explorers such as the Norwegians Fridtjof Nansen (1861-930) and Otto Sverdrup (1854-930) were able to penetrate Arctic ice by ship during the summer season. They then allowed their ship, the Fram, to freeze in the ice during winter and drift along with the natural circulation of Arctic sea ice. Roald Amundsen did something similar in the 1920s. Though humans had reached the North Pole by land and by air in the early twentieth century, the first “ship” to sail to the pole was an American submarine in 1958, and a year later, in 1959, a different American submarine reached the pole and breached through the ice to the surface. It was not until 1977 that a Russian icebreaker ship, the Arktika, reached the North Pole by bashing its way through the ice.

The last of the world’s oceans to be explored and named is the Southern Ocean. It was not until the twentieth century that the Southern Ocean was named as a separate ocean; originally, it was simply the southern part of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. Increasing recognition of its distinctive characteristics, such as water temperature, ocean currents, and marine life, led to its designation as a distinct ocean. Antarctica is a continent, and the Southern Ocean is shaped like a donut surrounding it.

The ancient Greeks theorized that a southern continent must exist to balance the landmasses of Europe, Asia, and Africa in the Northern Hemisphere. The word “Antarctic” means “opposite the Arctic,” and the word “Arctic” itself derives from a Greek word meaning “under the bear,” referring to the constellations of the Great Bear and Little Bear (Ursa Major and Ursa Minor), also known as the Big Dipper and Little Dipper, which the Greeks thought were situated above the north polar region. The desire to find this southern land, which many early explorers, even up to the eighteenth century, imagined strangely enough as some kind of tropical paradise, motivated much early exploration of the region. Some explorers thought that Australia must be this mysterious southern land, but others believed that there was still an undiscovered continent farther south.

The Pacific explorer Captain James Cook, previously mentioned, secretly attempted to find Antarctica. He never saw it, but he did come close enough to see icebergs. His reports on the animal life of the Southern Ocean prompted English and American whalers and sealers to hunt their prey in southern waters, using islands such as South Georgia, near the Falkland Islands, as their base. An expedition commanded by the Russian Fabian Bellingshausen (1778-852) was the first to actually see the continent of Antarctica in 1820, and the first human to ever set foot on the continent was possibly an American sealer named John Davis (1784-?), in 1821. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Southern Ocean was well-known to explorers, whalers, and sealers, and the focus of Antarctic exploration turned to what was on land.