1908-

English Arctic Explorer

British geologist and explorer Vivian Fuchs lead the first coast-to-coast land crossing of Antarctica in 1957. Fuchs's historic trek, undertaken in collaboration with a New Zealand team lead by Edmund Hillary (1919- ), was both a personal and technological victory over the severe Antarctic environment.

Fuchs was born on the Isle of Wight in 1908. In 1929 he earned a master's degree from Cambridge University and took part in the Cambridge Greenland Expedition as a field geologist. This venture gave him the necessary credentials to participate in two field trips to east Africa the following year. His next assignment was to lead an expedition to the Lake Rudolf-Rift Valley, where he was to survey 40,000 square miles of the Ethiopia-Kenya portion of Africa. The work he did on this expedition earned him a Ph.D. in geology from Cambridge in 1935.

During World War...