Exploration - Topics

Why is the deep sea still so mysterious? What happened to the lost Franklin Expedition? Why did the Age of Exploration begin? Why did the Vikings explore and settle? How sailors found longitude at sea before reliable chronometers: the lunar distance method Finding south without Polaris: how the Southern Cross and its pointers work The Cullum Geographical Medal and the era when exploration earned medals Why phantom islands appear when sailors mistake icebergs or cloud banks for land Why 19th-century maps showed a vast inland sea in the middle of Australia How scientists map the seafloor with sonar and satellite gravity The deepest place on Earth: why Challenger Deep keeps being remeasured How do expeditions turn their finds into publishable science today? Why the Mountains of Kong sat on African maps for nearly a hundred years The northernmost permanently inhabited settlement depends on what counts as inhabited How do you navigate with a paper map and compass once GPS fails? What is actually left to explore on Earth's surface? What did the Age of Discovery actually change about how Europeans pictured the globe? What goes into an explorer's kit for a month without resupply? How the Age of Discovery filled in the blank spaces on European maps What did the race to the South Pole cost the party that lost it? The first men to do what no one had ever done before What hydrothermal vents reveal about where life can begin Why is the deep ocean less mapped than the surface of Mars? How did the hunt for the Northwest Passage reshape Arctic maps? Why do so many famous expeditions fail on the way home? How animals survive crushing pressure at the bottom of the Mariana Trench Portolan charts: how Renaissance sailors’ practical mapping diverged from scholars’ world maps What the Royal Geographical Society does beyond publishing journals Why did mapping the ocean floor require inventing entirely new instruments? Why do so few women appear in the historical record of exploration? Finding the coordinates of a place with no address: offshore platforms and desert wells How much of Marco Polo's Travels can actually be verified