Vivian Fuchs

Sir Vivian Ernest Fuchs was an English scientist-explorer and expedition organiser, trained as a geologist at St John's College, Cambridge. Born in 1908 at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, he joined a Greenland expedition in 1929, studied the geology of the East African lakes, worked with Louis Leakey at Olduvai Gorge, led an expedition to Lake Rudolf in 1934 and another to the Lake Rukwa basin in 1937, and received his Cambridge doctorate in 1937. From 1947 he worked with the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey, now the British Antarctic Survey, which he directed from the end of the trans-Antarctic journey until 1973. He led the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, which made the first overland crossing of Antarctica in 1958 and gathered seismic and gravity data that showed the ice thickness at the pole. He was knighted in 1958, became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974 and died in 1999.