Kieran Mulvaney
Kieran Mulvaney is the author of At the Ends of the Earth: A History of the Polar Regions, and The Great White Bear: A Natural & Unnatural History of the Polar Bear. He has also covered boxing for ESPN, Reuters, Showtime and HBO.
Articles From This Author
4 Key Moments That Forced Americans to Confront Climate Change
Scientists first began to study climate change 200 years ago, but most of the events and discoveries that have driven conversation about the planet’s temperature came in more recent years. Here are some key moments that drew attention to the issues: 1. Early Evidence In 1958, ...read more
Why More and More Shipwrecks Are Being Discovered
It has been estimated that three million shipwrecks lie scattered on the seabed around the world. Most of them will never be found, but since the 2010s, searchers have been uncovering even the oldest and deepest wrecks. What’s behind the acceleration in discoveries? According to ...read more
The Stunning Survival Story of Ernest Shackleton and His Endurance Crew
All year, the ship had been trapped, ice pushing and pinching the hull, the wood howling in protest. Finally, on October 27, 1915, a new wave of pressure rippled across the ice, lifting the ship’s stern and tearing off its rudder and its keel. Freezing water began to rush in. ...read more
The Inuit Woman Who Survived Alone on an Arctic Island After a Disastrous Expedition
Wrangel Island sits north of the Siberian coast in the harsh Arctic waters of the East Siberian and Chukchi Seas. Surrounded by ice for much of the year and buffeted by fierce cyclonic winds throughout it, it is the last known redoubt of the woolly mammoth and is the site of the ...read more
Miracle of the Andes: How Survivors of the Flight Disaster Struggled to Stay Alive
At first, none of the passengers panicked. Few even showed much alarm. Most of the 45 on board were in their late teens and early twenties, members of a rugby team traveling from Uruguay to play an exhibition in Chile, and they whooped and hollered when their chartered plane hit ...read more
When Joe Louis Boxed Nazi Favorite Max Schmeling
Joe Louis wanted redemption, to remain the heavyweight boxing champion of the world and to avenge his sole defeat. Max Schmeling wanted repetition, the chance to regain the title he had lost and to defeat the younger man, just as he had beaten him two years earlier. As the bell ...read more
How the Ali-Frazier 'Fight of the Century' Became a Proxy Battle for a Divided Nation
When Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali faced each other in the ring on March 8, 1971, the world stopped to watch. Dubbed “the Fight of the Century,” the clash sold out Madison Square Garden in New York City, grossed $45 million in tickets at closed-circuit venues in the United States ...read more
Photos: Our Changing View of Earth from Space
The Apollo program transfixed the United States and the world in the 1960s for its heroic effort to fulfill the promise of President John F. Kennedy to go to the moon. But its most endearing legacy may have been, not visiting the barren world that is our planetary companion, but ...read more
What Happened to the Doomed Franklin Expedition? These Are the Clues
On May 19, 1845, the HMS Erebus with its sister ship HMS Terror sailed out of the River Thames, carrying 128 officers and men under the command of Sir John Franklin. Their mission: to locate and transit the fabled Northwest Passage, the long-sought pathway from Atlantic to ...read more
When Global Warming Was Revealed by a Zig-Zagged Curve
It looks, at first glance, like a doodle, a zig-zag pattern squiggled absent-mindedly on a notepad during an uninspiring meeting. In fact, it has been called one of the most important scientific works of the 20th century and its emergence in the 1950s offered one of the first key ...read more