Tom Avery

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Tom Avery was born on December 17 1975 in London, England and is an explorer, mountaineer, author and motivational speaker.

Avery was brought up in East Sussex, Brazil and France and attended the Harrow School and the University of Bristol. He has led mountaineering expeditions to the South American Andes, New Zealand, Tanzania and the Eastern Zaalay Mountains of Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia.

In December 2002 he became the youngest Briton to ski to the South Pole, a record he held for five days. Using power kites his four-man team travelled from Hercules Inlet to the South Pole in 45 days and 6 hours. His account of the expedition, Pole Dance, was Avery's first book and published in 2004.

In April 2005 Avery set out to recreate the disputed 1909 Arctic expedition of the American Commander Robert Peary, in which he claimed to have become the first man to reach the North Pole along with his five companions, Matthew Henson, Ootah, Egingwah, Seegloo, and Ookeah. Traveling in a similar style to Peary’s with Canadian Inuit Dog teams and wooden sledges, Avery's team set out from Peary's original Base Camp at Cape Columbia on Ellesmere Island and covered the 413 nautical miles to the Geographic North Pole in 36 days, 22 hours and 11 minutes, some four hours faster than Peary's claim. However, because global warming is causing the Arctic Ocean to break up earlier every year, he was unable to retrace Peary's footsteps back to Cape Columbia, a journey which the explorer had claimed to have covered in only 17 days.

Avery's website - [1]