Early geographic discoveries

Europeans started exploring Earth’s far southern reaches in the late

18th century for two main reasons: commercial gain and charting
cartographic and magnetic contours. While sealers charted
some island and sea routes in the sub-Antarctic, they kept this
information secret so as to not reveal their hunting locations. Early
sealers principally hailed from Britain and the United States, but, by
the mid-19th century, South Africans, Australians, New Zealanders,
and Frenchmen had joined them. These activities led to
near extinction of the southern fur seal.

The charting of Earth’s magnetic field, with its simplifications for

navigation, was another major incentive for these expeditions.
Together with nationalism, geomagnetic surveying was the main
motivation behind, for example, the 1839–43 British expedition led by
British explorer James Clark Ross, which discovered the Ross Sea, the
Ross Ice Barrier (now called the Ross Ice Shelf), and the Victoria
Land coast. Jules-Sébastien-César Dumont d’Urville’s French
expedition of 1837–40 discovered Adélie Land and later claimed it
for France. Charles Wilkes’s U.S. naval expedition of 1838–42
explored a large section of the East Antarctic coast.
The “heroic era” of exploration
During the first two decades of the 20th century, commonly called the
“heroic era” of Antarctic exploration, great advances were made in not
only geographic but also scientific knowledge of the continent. At the
turn of the century, expeditions scrambled to explore Antarctica. They
proved the feasibility of Antarctic overwintering and introduced
new technologies. The Belgian ship Belgica, under command of Adrien
de Gerlache, became the first vessel to winter in Antarctic waters
when, from March 1898 to March 1899, it was trapped and drifted
in pack ice of the Bellingshausen Sea. A scientific party under
Norwegian explorer Carsten E. Borchgrevink spent the next winter
camped at Cape Adare for the first planned overwintering on the
continent.