The John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding

Ross Virginia Reflects on His 27-Year Antarctic Research Project

Apr 13, 2017

Ross Virginia (r) with Sir David Attenborough in Antarctica in 2010. 

Just back from his final trip to Antarctica as an investigator for the Long Term Ecological Research Program, Professor Ross Virginia breaks off a conversation and strides across his office to pull out a hundred-year-old volume of Robert Falcon Scott’s The Voyage of the Discovery.

“This is his first expedition. It’s just a treasure,” says Virginia, the Myers Family Professor of Environmental Science.

“I’m just amazed and fascinated by all of this,” he says as he thumbs through the collected journals of the British explorer who, in 1912, was the second man to reach the South Pole (achieving the feat just 34 days behind Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen).

Read the entire profile at Dartmouth News