Raymond Priestley
Raymond Edward Priestley, Raymond Edward Priestley since 1949 Sir ( born July 20, 1886 in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, † June 24, 1974 in Cheltenham ) was a British geologist and early Antarctic explorer.
Life
Raymond Priestley was educated at Tewkesbury Grammar School. He was close to his degree in geology at the University of Bristol, when he hired as a geological assistant to Ernest Shackleton's Nimrod Expedition (1907-1909) to the Antarctic. On the expedition, he worked closely with the renowned Edgeworth David, another member of the expedition. Priestley collected minerals and lichen samples from the region, including of islands from the Ross Sea, the north face of the volcano Mount Erebus and mountains in the Ferrar Glacier. He was also a member of the group that put the food and fuel depots for Shackleton's nearly successful attempt to reach the first man to the South Pole. On a trip in November 1908 Priestley spent due to lack of space in a tent three days a snowstorm outside the tent in his sleeping bag. As the snow storm was raging, he slowly slid down the glacier and would have fallen at the foot almost to death.
Priestley returned as a member of the fateful Terra Nova expedition Robert Falcon Scott's 1910-1912 back to Antarctica. Immediately after they were landed in 1911 with Scott at Cape Evans, broke Priestley and five other men on the north, to explore the coast of Victoria Lands, where they built a hut near Carsten Egeberg Borchgrevinks camp of 1898 at Cape Adare. The same group returned in 1912 at the Terra Nova Bay on the coast back, halfway between Cape Evans and Cape Adare. Ten weeks later, their tent was destroyed and the Terra Nova, the ship of the expedition, the ice pack could not penetrate and absorb the group. In mid-February, they dug a small cave in a snowdrift and stayed there until the end of September, the beginning of southern spring, in an accommodation which they dubbed " Inexpressible Iceland ". In September, the men marched for five weeks before they coincidentally found a camp with food and fuel, and finally returned to Cape Evans.
His research on glaciers in Antarctica brought him after the First World War, a research undergraduate at Cambridge. In 1920 he founded, together with Frank Debenham the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge. From the 1930s until his retirement, he held a number of academic and administrative posts in Australia and England, where he Vice- Chancellor of the University of Melbourne, Vice Chancellor and Chancellor of the University of Birmingham, 1953 Chairman of the Royal Commission on the Civil Service and Deputy Director of today's British Antarctic Survey was. From 1961 to 1963 he was President of the Royal Geographical Society, 1949, he was awarded the accolade.