Polar Exploration Quotes

O proudly name their names who bravely sail: To seek brave lost in Arctic snows and seas!

It was not that long ago a bunch of researchers got on a boat and started chugging for the South Pole to find evidence of the melting glaciers and global warming, and they got stuck in the ice and it took three ice breakers and a helicopter to rescue them. Yet they still carry the day in the pop culture that global warming is happening.

Antarctica is a very alien environment, and you can't survive here more than minutes if you're not equipped properly and doing the right thing all the time.

Patience is what you need in the Antarctic. Wait-Give wind and tide a chance to change.

I have actually led more expeditions to Antarctica than Scott, Amundsen, and Shackleton put together.

That was another incredible thing: the opportunity to be in Greenland, a place I had read about in NatGeo a decade before. Suddenly I was staying there and hiking there, and we took a mini iceberg out of the water and chipped it up and used it as ice cubes and made cocktails with it. It's surreal.

The swim at Deception Island was by far the hardest swim I've ever done. Antarctica is a very unforgiving environment. If you don't train properly, you'll die.

It was 1975. I had spent the year at the Boston Museum School doing some very bizarre performance works. The last one included going to the North Magnetic Pole and spending all of my money.

In Winter, [the Antarctic] is perhaps the dreariest of places. Our base, Little America, lay in a bowl of ice, near the edge of the Ross Ice Barrier. The temperature fell as low as 72 degrees below zero. One could actually hear one's breath freeze.

The regions of the North Pole situated within the eighty-fourth degree of north latitude have not yet been utilized, for the very good reason that they have not yet been discovered.

Now my eyes are turned from the South to the North, and I want to lead one more Expedition. This will be the last... to the North Pole.

Who does not feel that Nansen's account of his search for the Pole rather loses than gains in ideal satisfaction by the pretense of a few trifling acquisitions for science?

If it's enough money, I'll play the North Pole.

A man who keeps company with glaciers comes to feel tolerably insignificant by and by.

Everything is on a reduced scale here in the Polar regions; we can't afford to be extravagant.

I would like to go to Antarctica. That's about all.

O, how glorious would it be to set my heel upon the Pole and turn myself 360 degrees in a second!

No man would ever use both hands to hold a cup of tea, unless he was one day's march from the South Pole, with one chum dead in the snow, dogs all eaten and six fingers about to drop off. And even then he would look around the empty tent to check, in case anybody thought it was girly.

To get the feel of the polar night, I went back to Spitsbergen in winter. I went snowshoeing in the dark and experimented with headlamps and climbed a glacier in driving snow.

People who go to the polar regions are statistically less likely to die than salesmen who drive on motorways in England.

I think the future of lunar bases has to be somewhere around the South or North Pole. You have less variation in temperature and more daylight hours.

I've always walked and climbed; spent a lot of time in the arctic and places.

I've become quite a serious explorer: I've been to Everest three times; I'm the oldest man to reach the North Pole; and I've just been to the lost world of Venezuela.

I had no doubts I could go to the pole. I may not be as strong, but I make up for physical strength in other areas, like steadiness and not panicking under stress.

No person who has not spent a period of his life in those 'stark and sullen solitudes that sentinel the Pole' will understand fully what trees and flowers, sun-flecked turf and running streams mean to the soul of a man