August 30 – A Frigid Discovery...

Posted on August 30, 2020

Julius Johannes Ludovicus Ritter von Payer - in addition to having a really long name - had a pretty long career description: he was an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army,  he was a painter and the founder of a painting school "for ladies," he was a history and geography teacher and a professor at a military academy, he was a topographer and a mapmaker, he was a mountain climber with more than 60 peaks in the Alps in his list of "first person known to climb" list...

...and (pant, pant) he was an Arctic explorer!

It's that last bit that earned Payer the most fame. He participated in a German exploration of the Arctic, working as a topographer. That means he wrote and drew a detailed description of the natural features of the areas explored, including the shapes and altitudes of landforms, rivers, and lakes. The sketches and writings were later transformed into a map of the area.



August 30, 1873: Payer and co-explorer Karl Weyprecht discovered and named Franz Josef Land, a bunch of islands in the Arctic Ocean. 192 islands, to be exact!



The Soviet Union annexed the islands in 1926, and they are now part of the Russian Arctic National Park.

And they're pretty amazing:




Photographers love the islands for the wildlife and the icebergs:










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