Taxonomy term

Filmmaker Tom Fitz describes the first time he found himself sitting, alone, more than 20 meters below Earth’s surface and about 300 meters into an underwater cave: He was waiting in position to film a sequence of divers swimming through a narrow passageway as their lights illuminated the chamber for his new, yet to be named, documentary. “I was suddenly in absolute, complete black,” Fitz says. “The kind of darkness that we rarely experience.”

We can only guess what Caroline Mikkelsen was thinking on Feb. 20, 1935, as she sipped her coffee, resting on a rocky hillside surrounded by the noise and stink of thousands of Adélie penguins. Minutes before, she had become the first woman to set foot in Antarctica and had helped hoist the Norwegian flag into place atop a rock cairn, claiming Norway’s influence in the land. Was she thrilled? Proud? Did she care about the significance of her presence there? We don’t know — little was recorded about the event; and most of what was recorded was lost for decades, resigning the episode, for a time, to footnote status amid the annals of a continent shrouded in mystery and a culture of polar exploration enraptured by the heroic and masculine deeds of the male explorers who had come before.

Early on the morning of Jan. 31, 1961, a chimpanzee named Ham, outfitted in a diaper, waterproof pants and a space suit, was sealed into a capsule and loaded onto a Mercury-Redstone 2 spacecraft in Cape Canaveral, Fla. Six hours later, Ham the Chimp, named after Holloman Aeromedical Research Laboratory at Holloman Air Force Base in Alamogordo, N.M., where he was trained, became the first hominid to travel into space.

When 21-year-old Raymond S. Bradley left England in 1969 to pursue a graduate degree at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU), he thought he’d be studying Denver’s urban climate. But on arrival, a funding mix-up delayed the work and Bradley found himself in search of a new project. While his doctoral work would ultimately involve studying the precipitation history of the Rockies, a new opportunity came his way in the summer of 1970 when his officemate needed a field assistant for a trip to the Arctic. So, Bradley headed to Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic on a three-month excursion that would prove to be just the first of dozens of Arctic expeditions to come over the course of a distinguished career.