Chris Brown | |
|---|---|
 British explorer Chris Brown at the South American POI in Brazil | |
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | Durham University, Heriot-Watt University |
| Occupation(s) | Entrepreneur, explorer, adventurer |
| Children | Axel Brown Mika Brown |
| Website | brown |
Chris Brown (born 1962) is a British explorer and adventurer known for his bid to become the first person in history to visit all eight of the Earth's Continental Poles of Inaccessibility. [1] To date, he has reached six of the eight poles. Brown holds a Guinness World Record for the most race dives into a swimming pool in one hour [2] and has been elected as a Lifelong Honorary Fellow of the Scientific Exploration Society [3] . He is also the father of Olympic bobsleigh athlete Axel Brown.
Born in Guisborough, North Yorkshire, Brown attended Stokesley Comprehensive School and King James's School in Knaresborough. He went on to study physics at Durham University, earning a Bachelor of Science degree, followed by a Master of Engineering in Petroleum Engineering from Heriot-Watt University. Brown began his career as a petroleum engineer with BP before establishing his own publishing company, Take That Limited, in 1987. In 1988, Brown was elected a Member and Chartered Physicist of the Institute of Physics. [4]
Brown, a tech entrepreneur from Harrogate, North Yorkshire, first got the "travel bug" while backpacking through South America as a student. [5]
Brown's idea to visit the Poles of Inaccessibility – the locations on Earth farthest away from the ocean, or, in the case of the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility and Northern Pole of Inaccessibility, land – first emerged during a trip to Antarctica in 2016. On this adventure, Brown learned about the various South Poles while travelling alongside former American astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who was attempting to become the oldest person to reach the South Pole. [5] [6]
Two years later, in 2018, this idea was cemented while attending the "world's highest dinner party" on Mount Everest, organised to raise funds for UK charity Community Action Nepal. During the visit, Brown heard about the Seven Summits Challenge, where people climb the highest mountains on each of the seven continents. Brown thought to try the same type of challenge for the Poles of Inaccessibility, marking the beginning of Brown's Eight Poles Project. [5] [7]
Brown's aim with the Eight Poles Project [8] is to be the first person to visit all of the Poles of Inaccessibility. These comprise Eurasia's Pole of Inaccessibility, Africa's Pole of Inaccessibility, Australia's Pole of Inaccessibility, Northern Pole of Inaccessibility, Southern Pole of Inaccessibility, North American Pole of Inaccessibility, South American Pole of Inaccessibility, and the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility/Point Nemo. [9]
As of 2024, he has visited six of the eight poles. [5]
North American Pole of Inaccessibility
Brown's first successful venture in the Eight Poles Project was reaching the North American Pole of Inaccessibility [10] , on land belonging to the Oglala Sioux Tribe in South Dakota, on 19th July 2019, accompanied by his son Axel Brown.
African Pole of Inaccessibility
A team of Chris Brown, Catherine Vinton, Jacob Johnson and Larry Reeves became the first recorded people to reach the African Pole of Inaccessibility [11] on 7th December 2021. The team flew from Bangui, the capital of Central African Republic, to Obo the nearest settlement to the pole. The group were accompanied on the trek through the triple-canopy jungle by four members of FACA (Forces armées centrafricaines) in this very dangerous part of Africa close to the country's tripoint with South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. [12]
Australian Pole of Inaccessibility
Chris Brown, Kimberley Morgan, Simika Best and station-manager Terry reached the Pole of Inaccessibility for Australia on 11th May 2022 with kind permission of Hewitt Cattle, the owners of Derwent Cattle Station in Australia’s Northern Territory, northwest of Alice Springs. On the same expedition, they visited the Australian Centre of Gravity (Geographical Centre) and the Australian Mainland Centre which, unusually, are in close proximity to one another. [13]
Southern Pole of Inaccessibility
Chris Brown, Mika Brown and Catherine Vinton first attempted to reach the Southern Pole of Inaccessibility, or the Pole of Inaccessibility for Antarctica, in December 2021. The expedition suffered several technical setbacks with their Twin Otter aircraft and became stranded in a sequence of four Antarctic storms with precipitation and winds of 120mph. After 28 days the expedition was abandoned.
Brown and his son Mika returned the following year and this time the plan went to schedule. On 11th January 2023, they first visited the traditional Southern Pole of Inaccessibility at the Soviet Union research station where they found that just the head and shoulders of the Lenin Bust and a non-functioning weather mast are all that remain above the ice. They then moved on to the British Antarctic Survey defined Southern Pole of Inaccessibility at 82°53′14″S 55°4′30″E, which is the current best estimate for the Pole not taking into account Ice Shelves. [14]
South American Pole of Inaccessibility
On 29th May 2023, a small team of Chris Brown, Larry Reeves and Adam Barwell reached the South American Pole of Inaccessibility in the Matto Grosso region of Arenápolis, Brazil. At the exact coordinates they found an old machete stuck in the ground marking the point. [15]
Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility (Point Nemo)
In March 2024, Brown, again accompanied by Mika, reached the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility at Point Nemo, located in the South Pacific Ocean between New Zealand and Chile, and 1,670 miles (2,688 km) from land. Setting sail on the chartered expedition yacht Hanse Explorer from Puerto Montt in Chile on March 12, they reached the pole on March 20.
At the exact coordinates, Brown and Mika jumped into the water to become the first recorded people to swim at Point Nemo, accompanied by Videographer Adam Watson and overseen by Doug Shields. The team also visited the two alternative locations for Point Nemo, as calculated by Croatian survey engineer Hrvoje Lukatela for the avoidance of doubt that humans have now visited the exact location of Point Nemo. [16]
In 2023, in the wake of the Titan submersible implosion, Brown revealed that he had paid a deposit for a place aboard the OceanGate vessel but had subsequently pulled out over concerns about its safety. He was a friend of British billionaire Hamish Harding, who died on the sub. [17] [18]
The history of Antarctica emerges from early Western theories of a vast continent, known as Terra Australis, believed to exist in the far south of the globe. The term Antarctic, referring to the opposite of the Arctic Circle, was coined by Marinus of Tyre in the 2nd century AD.
Fram ("Forward") is a ship that was used in expeditions of the Arctic and Antarctic regions by the Norwegian explorers Fridtjof Nansen, Otto Sverdrup, Oscar Wisting, and Roald Amundsen between 1893 and 1912. It was designed and built by the Scottish-Norwegian shipwright Colin Archer for Fridtjof Nansen's 1893 Arctic expedition in which the plan was to freeze Fram into the Arctic ice sheet and float with it over the North Pole.
In geography, a pole of inaccessibility is the farthest location in a given landmass, sea, or other topographical feature, starting from a given boundary, relative to a given criterion. A geographical criterion of inaccessibility marks a location that is the most challenging to reach according to that criterion. Often it refers to the most distant point from the coastline, implying the farthest point into a landmass from the shore, or the farthest point into a body of water from the shore. In these cases, a pole of inaccessibility is the center of a maximally large circle that can be drawn within an area of interest only touching but not crossing a coastline. Where a coast is imprecisely defined, the pole will be similarly imprecise.
Elephant Island is an ice-covered, mountainous island off the coast of Antarctica in the outer reaches of the South Shetland Islands, in the Southern Ocean. The island is situated 245 kilometres north-northeast of the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, 1,253 kilometres west-southwest of South Georgia, 935 kilometres south of the Falkland Islands, and 885 kilometres southeast of Cape Horn. It is within the Antarctic claims of Argentina, Chile and the United Kingdom.
Faddey Faddeyevich Bellingshausen or Fabian Gottlieb Benjamin von Bellingshausen was a Russian cartographer, explorer, and naval officer of Baltic German descent, who attained the rank of admiral. He participated in the first Russian circumnavigation of the globe, and subsequently became a leader of another circumnavigation expedition that discovered the continent of Antarctica. Like Otto von Kotzebue and Adam Johann von Krusenstern, Bellingshausen belonged to the cohort of prominent Baltic German navigators who helped Russia launch its naval expeditions.
This article lists extreme locations on Earth that hold geographical records or are otherwise known for their geophysical or meteorological superlatives. All of these locations are Earth-wide extremes; extremes of individual continents or countries are not listed.
Multiple governments have set up permanent research stations in Antarctica and these bases are widely distributed. Unlike the drifting ice stations set up in the Arctic, the current research stations of the Antarctic are constructed either on rocks or on ice that are fixed in place.
The Pole of Inaccessibility research station is a defunct Soviet research station in Kemp Land, Antarctica, at the southern pole of inaccessibility as defined in 1958 when the station was established. Later definitions give other locations, all relatively near this point. It performed meteorological observations from 14 to 26 December 1958. The Pole of Inaccessibility has the world's coldest year-round average temperature of −58.2 °C (−72.8 °F).
Paul Landry M.B. is a French-Canadian polar explorer, author, and adventurer who is the only paid man to ever reach three Geographical poles in a single year.
Robert Charles Swan, OBE, FRGS is the first person to walk to both poles.
Fyodor Filippovich Konyukhov is a Russian survivalist, voyager, aerial and marine explorer. In December 2010 he became an Eastern Orthodox priest in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.
Farthest South refers to the most southerly latitudes reached by explorers before the first successful expedition to the South Pole in 1911.
Antarctica is Earth's southernmost and least-populated continent. Situated almost entirely south of the Antarctic Circle and surrounded by the Southern Ocean, it contains the geographic South Pole. Antarctica is the fifth-largest continent, being about 40% larger than Europe, and has an area of 14,200,000 km2 (5,500,000 sq mi). Most of Antarctica is covered by the Antarctic ice sheet, with an average thickness of 1.9 km (1.2 mi).
The South Pole, also known as the Geographic South Pole or Terrestrial South Pole, is the southernmost point on Earth and lies antipodally on the opposite side of Earth from the North Pole, at a distance of 20,004 km in all directions. It is one of the two points where Earth's axis of rotation intersects its surface.
The Southern Ocean, also known as the Antarctic Ocean, comprises the southernmost waters of the world ocean, generally taken to be south of 60° S latitude and encircling Antarctica. With a size of 20,327,000 km2 (7,848,000 sq mi), it is the second-smallest of the five principal oceanic divisions, smaller than the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans, and larger than the Arctic Ocean.
Major explorations of Earth continued after the Age of Discovery. By the early seventeenth century, vessels were sufficiently well built and their navigators competent enough to travel to virtually anywhere on the planet by sea. In the 17th century, Dutch explorers such as Willem Jansz and Abel Tasman explored the coasts of Australia. Spanish expeditions from Peru explored the South Pacific and discovered archipelagos such as Vanuatu and the Pitcairn Islands. Luis Vaez de Torres chartered the coasts of New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, and discovered the strait that bears his name. European naval exploration mapped the western and northern coasts of Australia, but the east coast had to wait for over a century. Eighteenth-century British explorer James Cook mapped much of Polynesia and traveled as far north as Alaska and as far south as the Antarctic Circle. In the later 18th century, the Pacific became a focus of renewed interest, with Spanish expeditions, followed by Northern European ones, reaching the coasts of northern British Columbia and Alaska.
Michael Horn is a South African-born Swiss professional explorer and adventurer. Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, he currently resides in Château d'Œx, Switzerland. He studied Human Movement Science at Stellenbosch University in Western Cape, South Africa. Horn is currently undertaking his latest expedition Pole2Pole, a two-year circumnavigation of the globe via the two poles.
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This is a Timeline ofwomen in Antarctica. This article describes many of the firsts and accomplishments that women from various countries have accomplished in different fields of endeavor on the continent of Antarctica.