Caroline Mikkelsen landed from the whaling ship M/S Thorshavn on an island near the Vestfold Hills, becoming the first woman recorded to set foot in Antarctica.
On 20 February 1935, Caroline Mikkelsen stepped ashore from the Norwegian whaling vessel M/S Thorshavn onto an island within the Tryne Island group, near the Vestfold Hills of East Antarctica. She was accompanying her husband, Captain Klarius Mikkelsen, on a whaling and exploration voyage sponsored by Norwegian shipping magnate Lars Christensen. During the landing, the couple raised the Norwegian flag at a stone cairn, symbolically claiming the moment for Norway's polar ambitions.
This event is widely credited as the first time a woman set foot on Antarctic territory, predating other women's Antarctic landings by years. Guinness World Records and numerous historical accounts recognize this as a landmark achievement in the history of polar exploration and women's participation in it, at a time when Antarctic expeditions were almost exclusively the domain of men.
Later geographic scholarship clarified that the island landed upon was part of an offshore island group rather than the Antarctic mainland itself, a distinction that would later place fellow explorer Ingrid Christensen as first woman on the actual continental mainland in 1937. Nonetheless, Mikkelsen's landing remains a celebrated and pioneering moment, and it predates virtually all other recorded female presence in the region. The nearby Mount Caroline Mikkelsen was later named in her honor, cementing her legacy in Antarctic geography and the broader narrative of women breaking barriers in exploration.