Douglas Mawson

Today is the birthday of geologist and Antarctic explorer Douglas Mawson, born in Shipley, England, in 1882. His family moved to Australia near Sydney in 1884. In 1903 Mawson went on his first geological expedition. He became a leading Australian geologist and discovered the mineral davidite, which contains uranium. In 1907 Mawson was named physicist of Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition. Mawson was part of the teams that scaled Mount Erebus and reached the south magnetic pole. Robert Falcon Scott invited Mawson to join another Antarctic expedition, but Mawson declined and in 1911 organized one focused on science: the Australasian Antarctic Expedition. After setting up main camp at Commonwealth Bay, the team split up and Mawson set out eastward with Xavier Mertz and Belgrave Ninnis. Nearly 500 km into the journey, Ninnis fell through a crevasse along with the team’s tent, six dogs, and almost all the men’s food. Mertz died on the way back to camp, possibly from hazardously high doses of vitamin A in the dog livers the men had resorted to eating. Miraculously, Mawson survived and held onto his scientific samples and records. Over the next few decades, Mawson recorded the expedition’s scientific findings in 22 volumes and wrote a memoir. Historian J. Gordon Hayes later wrote, “Sir Douglas Mawson’s Expedition, judged by the magnitude both of its scale and of its achievements, was the greatest and most consummate expedition that ever sailed for Antarctica.”

Date in History: 5 May 1882