Website:Women in Antarctica

Organization: Exploratorium Museum of Science and Art

Project: Origins, Antarctica

Role: Researcher, writer

I wrote about the history of women in Antarctica for a National Science Foundation-funded digital series. At the time, there was little written about women’s arrival and research in Antarctica. As a result, my story was picked up by several digital and print publications, including this one.

Excerpt: In the 1950s, only one woman, a Russian marine geologist named Marie V. Klenova, made it ashore. Russian women had sailed on whaling ships in Antarctica’s oceans earlier in the century, paving the way for the country’s female scientists. Klenova joined a Soviet oceanographic team on a Russian icebreaker in 1956, mapping unchartered areas of the Antarctic coastline and coming ashore periodically at a Russian base. Eventually, Klenova’s research helped form the first Antarctic atlas, published by the Soviet Union.