Across Greenland's Ice Cap: The Remarkable Swiss Scientific Expedition of 1912

As polar exploration reached its zenith, and in the same month that Captain Robert Falcon Scott perished in Antarctica, four young scientists from Zurich took ship for Greenland. Though they had little previous experience of arctic travel, their ambition was to achieve the first west-to-east crossing of the northern hemisphere’s largest ice cap, making scientific observations along the way.

Few outside Switzerland have heard of this expedition or its leader, the meteorologist Alfred de Querv...