Roald Amundsen is known as one of the greatest polar explorers in history, most famously for leading the first expedition to reach the South Pole on December 14, 1911. But that single achievement, while his most celebrated, was part of a larger career that included the first successful navigation of the Northwest Passage, the first verified flight over the North Pole, and groundbreaking scientific work on Earth’s magnetic field.
First to the South Pole
Amundsen and four companions reached the geographic South Pole on December 14, 1911, beating a British team led by Robert Falcon Scott by about five weeks. The men who stood at the pole with him were Helmer Hanssen, Sverre Hassel, Oscar Wisting, and Olav Bjaaland, who took the famous photograph of the group beside their tent.
What set Amundsen apart from Scott was ruthlessly practical planning. Amundsen relied entirely on sled dogs, starting with 52 and returning with 11. He planned from the beginning to kill weaker animals along the way to feed the remaining dogs and the men themselves. Scott, by contrast, used a combination of ponies, dogs, and motor sledges. The ponies were poorly suited to Antarctic conditions: they sweated through their skin, making them vulnerable to cold, and their food had to be shipped from England. Dogs could eat seal and penguin meat hunted on-site, and they cooled themselves by panting rather than sweating, a critical advantage in freezing temperatures. Scott’s entire party died on the return journey.
First Through the Northwest Passage
Before Antarctica, Amundsen had already made exploration history. Between 1903 and 1906, he and six crew members sailed a small converted fishing vessel called the Gjøa through the Northwest Passage, the sea route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through the Canadian Arctic. Explorers had been attempting this passage for centuries, and many had died trying, most notably the Franklin expedition of 1845.
Amundsen departed from what is now Oslo on June 16, 1903, stopped in Greenland to pick up 20 sled dogs, then threaded through narrow straits between the Canadian mainland and the southern islands of the Canadian Archipelago. He chose a route through Peel Sound and Franklin Strait, eventually reaching King William Island, where the expedition stayed for two full years. During that time, Amundsen wasn’t idle. He conducted extensive scientific measurements and, critically, lived alongside the Netsilik Inuit people.
The Gjøa finally left King William Island on August 13, 1905, and on August 17 reached Cape Colbourne, the easternmost point any ship had reached from the Bering Strait side. The passage was complete.
What He Learned From the Inuit
Those two years on King William Island shaped everything Amundsen did afterward. The Netsilik Inuit taught him survival techniques that European explorers had stubbornly ignored for generations. He learned to use dog sled teams for long-distance travel across terrain where deep snow and ice ridges made walking exhausting and slow. He adopted animal-skin clothing in place of the thick woolen parkas favored by European expeditions, which became dangerously heavy when wet. Animal furs, refined over generations by Arctic peoples, insulated far better and stayed light.
These lessons directly contributed to his South Pole success. While Scott’s team struggled with equipment and clothing designed in England, Amundsen’s approach was built on Indigenous Arctic knowledge that had been tested over thousands of years.
First Verified Flight Over the North Pole
In 1926, Amundsen co-led an expedition that flew the airship Norge from Svalbard, Norway, across the North Pole to Alaska, crossing the entire Arctic Ocean for the first time. The 106-meter-long airship carried 16 men, with Amundsen as expedition leader, American financier Lincoln Ellsworth as navigator, and Italian engineer Umberto Nobile as pilot. They departed Ny-Ålesund on May 11 and passed over the North Pole at 1:25 a.m. Greenwich time on May 12.
Two earlier claims to the North Pole, by Robert Peary in 1909 and Richard Byrd just days before the Norge flight, have both been seriously questioned by historians and navigational experts. The Norge expedition is now widely considered the first verified arrival at the North Pole. For Amundsen and crew member Oscar Wisting, who had also been at the South Pole in 1911, the flight made them the first people in history to reach both poles.
Scientific Work on Earth’s Magnetic Field
Amundsen’s two-year stay on King William Island during the Northwest Passage expedition wasn’t just about survival skills. He set up a polar observation station called Gjøahavn and conducted careful magnetic field measurements. His data proved, for the first time, that the north magnetic dip-pole (the point where a compass needle would point straight down) doesn’t sit in a fixed location. It moves steadily and in a regular pattern. His calibrated measurements of Earth’s magnetic field in the polar regions remained the only such observations for decades, until modern polar observatories were built.
His Disappearance and Death
Amundsen died on June 18, 1928, at the age of 55. Ironically, his death was connected to Umberto Nobile, the man who had piloted the Norge two years earlier. Nobile’s airship Italia had crashed in the Arctic while returning from the North Pole, and Amundsen joined the international rescue effort despite a strained relationship with Nobile. He and five crew members flew a French Latham 47 prototype seaplane from Tromsø, Norway, heading out over the Barents Sea. The plane had not even completed its flight tests, and Amundsen had been warned against using it. The party vanished. Only a wing float and a fuel tank were ever recovered.
Landmarks Named in His Honor
The permanent U.S. research station at the South Pole is named the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, honoring both Amundsen and his rival Robert Falcon Scott. The National Science Foundation built the original station in 1975, featuring a distinctive geodesic dome. A modernized replacement was dedicated in 2008 and remains in operation year-round, housing scientists working on climate, astronomy, and geophysics at the bottom of the world.