50+ Amazing Photographs From Antarctic Expeditions In The Early 20th Century

The Antarctic continent was one of the last great unknowns on Earth. In the early 20th century, a wave of expeditions pushed into this frozen and brutal region, gathering scientific data, charting coastlines, and documenting a world that few humans had ever seen. More than 400 historical claims relate to Antarctic exploration, making it nearly impossible to compile a definitive list of every person who set foot on or near the ice. What survives more clearly are the photographs — sharp, remarkable, and often haunting images that tell the story better than any written log.

The man responsible for most of these photographs was James Francis Hurley, known as Frank Hurley. He served as the official photographer on multiple Antarctic expeditions, most notably Douglas Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition (AAE) and Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. Other expedition members also contributed photographs throughout these journeys. Together, their work produced one of the most complete visual records of early Antarctic exploration ever assembled. The images below are drawn from those expeditions, spanning roughly 1911 to 1915, and they capture everything from scientific fieldwork to the raw extremes of life on the ice.

Macquarie Island, located roughly halfway between New Zealand and Antarctica, served as a key stopping point for expeditions heading south. The wreck of the Gratitude on its shore was a sobering reminder of how unforgiving these sub-Antarctic waters could be. The island was also home to wildlife found almost nowhere else, including sea elephants and seabirds that expedition members studied and photographed extensively.

Commonwealth Bay, on the Adélie Land coast, served as the main base for Mawson’s AAE. The region was notoriously windy — average wind speeds there are among the highest recorded anywhere on Earth. Ice formations carved by wind and water surrounded the bay, creating structures that looked almost architectural. Frank Bickerton, one of the expedition’s engineers, was photographed gazing out over the churning grey seas, a scene that captures both the isolation and the scale of the environment.

The Antarctic summer brought its own surreal quality. At midsummer, the sun never fully set, casting long golden light across ice turrets and sculpted formations at midnight. Ice took on extraordinary shapes — mushroom caps, arched caverns, and glowing towers — all formed by the constant interaction of wind, sea, and freezing temperatures. Hurley treated these formations as subjects worthy of careful composition, and the results were photographs that looked as much like art as documentation.

The AAE used multiple methods of transport across the ice. Mawson brought an air-tractor — a propeller-driven sledge — which was one of the first motorized vehicles used in Antarctica. It proved unreliable in the extreme cold, but the attempt demonstrated the expedition’s forward-thinking approach. More dependable were the Greenlandic husky teams, which pulled heavy sledges across the ice with speed and endurance that no machine at the time could consistently match.

Science was central to the AAE’s mission. Harold Hamilton, the expedition’s biologist, is shown netting macro-plankton from the deck of the Aurora — the expedition’s supply ship. This kind of marine sampling helped researchers understand the Southern Ocean’s food web. The Aurora made multiple voyages between Australia and Antarctica, resupplying the main base at Cape Denison and the western base on the Queen Mary Land coast.

Sea elephants were a constant presence on Macquarie Island. Arthur Sawyer was photographed beside a pup, illustrating the relatively close range at which expedition members worked with the wildlife. Harold Hamilton is also pictured alongside a sea elephant skeleton, part of the zoological documentation that formed a large portion of the AAE’s scientific output. These images were not just records of curiosity — they contributed to formal species studies published after the expedition returned.

Life at the main base in Cape Denison was a mixture of hard work, scientific routine, and close-quarters living. The expedition hut held over a dozen men who cooked, ate, repaired equipment, and waited out blizzards together. The kitchen photograph shows the functional, cramped reality of base life — a stark contrast to the dramatic landscapes visible just outside the door. Meanwhile, the Aurora pushed through loose pack ice in the Dumont d’Urville Sea to maintain the supply line that kept the base operational.

Frank Hurley was not only a still photographer. He also shot motion picture footage during the AAE, making him one of the earliest cinematographers to document Antarctica on film. Washing and processing film aboard a ship in Antarctic waters required careful work — the cold, damp environment was hostile to photographic chemistry. The image of Hurley handling his film on the Aurora’s deck shows the technical demands that came with documenting exploration before the age of digital media.

Sledge journeys from the main base pushed deep into Adélie Land, carrying supplies to depots for longer inland treks. Douglas Mawson himself is photographed resting beside his sledge on the first such journey outward. Wild and Watson are shown sheltering together in a sleeping bag inside a tent — a common strategy for sharing body heat in temperatures that regularly dropped far below freezing. These images record the physical reality of Antarctic travel: exhausting, slow, and dangerous.

Xavier Mertz, a Swiss ski champion who joined the AAE, is shown exiting the hut through a trapdoor on the verandah roof. During the worst blizzards at Cape Denison, the wind made normal doors unusable, and the roof exit became the standard way in and out of the building. Mertz would later die on the Far Eastern Sledging Journey of 1912–13, one of the most harrowing survival stories in polar history.

Cape Denison earned the nickname ‘Home of the Blizzard’ — a title Mawson later used for his published account of the expedition. Winds there regularly exceeded 100 miles per hour. Adélie penguins, caught in storms, were sometimes encased in ice where they stood, their bodies frozen solid. One photograph shows a completely frozen Adélie penguin — a direct record of how lethal the conditions were even for animals evolved to survive there. A husky pup named Blizzard also appears in the photographs, one of several dogs that became recognizable figures at the base.

Cecil Madigan, the expedition’s meteorologist, was photographed with his face encrusted in ice — a condition that developed quickly in the blowing spindrift at Cape Denison. Expedition members sometimes couldn’t walk more than a few steps outside without ice building up on their exposed skin. Dogs named Basilisk and Ginger were photographed at the main base, reflecting the personal bonds that formed between the men and the working animals they depended on.

Robert Bage led the Southern Supporting Party during the AAE, pushing 65 miles south of the main base with John Hunter and Frank Hurley. Bage also operated the expedition’s magnetic and astronomical observatory, conducting measurements that contributed to the scientific understanding of Earth’s southern magnetic field. His work required precise instruments and careful daily routines, carried out in some of the world’s most extreme conditions.

The wildlife photographs from Macquarie Island and the Antarctic coastline form a significant part of the AAE’s photographic archive. King penguins, Victoria penguins, male and female sea elephants — all were documented in careful detail. These images supported the zoological reports published by Harold Hamilton and others after the expedition returned to Australia. Several species photographed during the AAE were at the time poorly understood by science.

The AAE operated two separate bases — the main base at Cape Denison and a western base on the Queen Mary Land coast. In February 1912, dogs were unloaded at the western base to support sledging operations in that region. The western team spent its winters in quarters photographed against the vast, flat expanse of the Queen Mary Land ice sheet. Weddell seals, photographed along the Shackleton Ice Shelf, were among the marine mammals documented by the expedition’s biologists.

Unloading supplies at Cape Denison was a logistical challenge every time the Aurora arrived. Equipment, food, fuel, and scientific instruments had to be moved from ship to shore across unstable sea ice or through rough surf. Cecil Madigan and Douglas Mawson are photographed at the rail of the Aurora, a moment that captures the transition between the relative safety of the ship and the harsh reality of the base. The Sclater penguin, also documented during this period, added to the growing biological catalogue produced by the expedition.

One of the most striking images from the entire expedition is the Aurora photographed from inside a cavern cut into the Mertz Glacier Tongue. The ship appears framed by blue-white ice walls, a composition that Hurley clearly understood as extraordinary. The group portrait of expedition members and the shot of men in full sledging gear on the plateau round out the human element of the archive — faces and figures behind the science and the hardship.

Moving around Cape Denison during a blizzard required crampons strapped to boots and ice axes for stability. Even with that equipment, progress was slow and dangerous. Men were occasionally blown off their feet. The base recorded wind gusts exceeding 200 miles per hour during the worst storms. For the scientists stationed there, getting from one building to another could take significant effort and carry genuine risk.

By 1914, Frank Hurley had joined Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition aboard the Endurance. He is photographed both beneath the ship’s bow and operating his cinematograph — the same dedication to documentation he had brought to the AAE. The Endurance expedition aimed to cross the Antarctic continent from sea to sea, a journey that never reached the ice because the ship became locked in the Weddell Sea pack ice before it could land.

The Endurance stopped at South Georgia before heading south into the Weddell Sea. The glaciers at New Fortuna Bay were photographed during that stop — towering walls of ice descending directly into the sea. Once the ship entered the pack ice, Hurley began capturing the frozen seascape from aboard the drifting vessel. The Endurance, viewed through the irregular hummocks of pressure ice, appears almost engulfed — a preview of what was to come.

A ‘lead’ is a narrow channel of open water that forms between ice floes. When a lead appeared in the pack ice, it offered a potential path forward for the ship. Ernest Shackleton is photographed watching one form — a moment of intense focus for a man whose entire expedition depended on finding a way through. The Weddell Sea pack ice that year was unusually thick and closed early, trapping the Endurance before it could reach the continent.

Daily life aboard the Endurance continued even as the ship drifted helplessly in the ice. John Vincent, the bosun, is shown mending a net on deck — routine maintenance work that carried on regardless of the growing crisis. A wandering albatross chick was photographed during the South Georgia stop, adding to the natural history record of the voyage. The deck of the Endurance, photographed in the Antarctic light, shows the ship as a working vessel in a world that had become entirely hostile to it.

The Endurance was eventually frozen solid at 76 degrees 35 minutes south latitude. Hurley photographed the ship both under full sail — one of the last times it moved freely — and locked motionless in the ice. The pressure of the pack eventually crushed the ship’s hull, and it sank in November 1915. Hurley saved as many of his glass plate negatives as he could before abandoning ship, salvaging the photographic record that now defines the entire expedition.

The ice that stopped the Endurance was not just pack ice but a compacted, impenetrable field that no ship of that era could have broken through. Pressure ridges — walls of ice forced upward by the collision of ice floes — glowed pink and orange in the low-angle polar sun. The ship’s rigging accumulated rime crystals, coating every rope and spar in a layer of white ice. These photographs balance the beauty of the polar environment against its absolute indifference to human ambition.

The Neumeyer Glacier on South Georgia was another stop documented in Hurley’s lens before the Endurance headed into the Weddell Sea. Once the ship was frozen in, the changing light of the Antarctic seasons became the backdrop for months of entrapment. A midsummer sunset cast the ice in deep red and orange, while the midwinter glow — the faint light that appeared even during the polar night — gave the Endurance an almost ghostly appearance against the dark ice.

Alfred Cheetham, one of the Endurance’s officers, is photographed sending signals in 1915 — communication that grew increasingly critical as the expedition’s situation deteriorated. Dog teams were sent out across the ice to scout possible routes to land, but the distances were too great and the ice too unstable. South Georgia, where the expedition had paused at the start of the voyage, is captured in a sunrise photograph that contrasts sharply with the months of frozen darkness the crew would later endure in the Weddell Sea. These final images close out a photographic record that spans two of the most important Antarctic expeditions ever mounted.