Polar Explorers for Kids: Historic Expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic with 21 Activities
Arctic Exploration Time Line 5000 Inuit people formerly called Eskimos establish themselves in the Arctic region A D 860 870 Vikings discover and settle Iceland 981 986 Erik the Red locates and settles Greenland an Inte 1001 Leif Eriksson Erik the Red's son explores Baffin Island Labrador and Newfoundland 1272 Marco Polo explores China 1492 Christopher Columbus explores the West Indies and the New World 1497 John Cabot discovers Newfoundland Europeans begin to contemplate creating a Northwest Passage a route to China through the Arctic 1498 Christopher Columbus explores South Amer 1ca 1500 João Fernande's reaches Greenland Gaspar Corte Real reaches Newfoundland kidnaps 57 Indians and takes them back to
Portugal 1510 Leonardo da Vinci invents the horizontal water wheel which leads to the creation of turbine engines 1519 1522 Magellan circumnavigates the globe 1575 1590s Tycho Brahe sets up an astronomy observato ry develops his theory of a sun centered solar system 1585 Martin Frobisher reaches Baffin Island 1585 1587 John Davis sails into Baffin Bay along Greenland's and Labrador's coasts 1607 Henry Hudson reaches northern Green land Spitsbergen and the Siberian coast 1610 1611 Henry Hudson and his son discover James Bay their crew mutinies and sets them adrift in a small boat and they vanish and are presumed dead Whaling industry is in full swing 1620 Pilgrims land at Plymouth Rock 1670s Fur trade is established in the Arctic join ing whaling sealing and cod fishery indus tries
1740 Vitus Bering discovers Alaska across the Bering Strait from Russia 1776 United States Declaration of Independence is signed 1785 Russia settles the Aleutian Islands between mainland Russia and Alaska 1819 William Parry passes Greenland into Lan caster Sound then travels north of the North Magnetic Pole spends the winter near Melville Island 1845 1847 Sir John Franklin reaches the Victoria Strait and maps miles of island coastline he and his entire crew vanish 1861 1865 United States Civil War 1882 1883 First International Polar Year 11 countries participate in studies of the Arctic and Antarctica 1879 Thomas A Edison perfects the electric light bulb 1880s Inupiats discover oil seeping from the ground near the Beaufort Sea 1893 1896 Fridtjof Nansen analyzes polar water cur rents uses them to move his ship to far thest north 1903 Wright Brothers first fly an airplane at Kitty Hawk North Carolina
1908 1909 Robert Peary and his assistant Matthew Henson an African American claim to be the first to have reached the North Pole Frederick Cook makes the same claim 1908 1918 Vilhjalmur Stefansson discovers and remaps huge areas of Arctic promotes a natural gas industry and oxen ranching for Arctic peoples 1914 1918 World War I 1939 1945 World War II 1955 Louise Arner Boyd a photographer becomes the first woman to reach the North Pole by plane 1962 John Glenn Jr becomes the first American astronaut to orbit Earth 1968 Huge oil deposits are found in Alaska's Prudhoe Bay area 1986 William Steger and Paul Schurke reach the North Pole by dogsled Ann Bancroft becomes the first woman to reach the North Pole by land 1991 Nunavut a circumpolar province within Canada is established 1993 2000 Gretel Ehrlich a writer explores Greenland and its native peoples indicates approximate date
