Captain Robert Falcon Scott CVO (June 6, 1868 – c. March 29, 1912) is a Royal Navy officer and explorer who leads two expeditions to the Antarctic regions: the Discovery expedition of 1901–1904 and the ill-fated Terra Nova expedition of 1910–1913.

On the first expedition, he sets a new southern record by marching to latitude 82°S and discovers the Antarctic Plateau, on which the South Pole is located

On the second venture, Scott leads a party of five that reaches the South Pole on January 17. 1912, less than five weeks after Amundsen's South Pole expedition.

A planned meeting with supporting dog teams from the base camp fails, despite Scott's written instructions, and at a distance of one hundred and sixty-two miles (two hundred and sixty-one kilometers) from their base camp at Hut Point and approximately twelve and a half miles (twenty kilometers) from the next depot, Scott and his companions die.

When Scott and his party's bodies are discovered, they have in their possession the first Antarctic fossils ever discovered.

The fossils will be determined to be from the Glossopteris tree and will prove that Antarctica was once forested and joined to other continents. 

Before his appointment to lead the Discovery expedition, Scott had a career as a naval officer in the Royal Navy

In 1899, he had a chance encounter with Sir Clements Markham, the president of the Royal Geographical Society, and thus learned of a planned Antarctic expedition, which he soon volunteered to lead.

Having taken this step, his name became inseparably associated with the Antarctic, the field of work to which he remained committed during the final twelve years of his life.

Following the news of his death, Scott becomes a celebrated hero, a status reflected by memorials erected across the UK.

However, in the last decades of the twentieth century, questions will be raised about his competence and character.

Commentators in the twenty-first  century will regard  Scott more positively after assessing the temperature drop below −40 °C (−40 °F) in March 1912, and after re-discovering Scott's written orders of October 1911, in which he had instructed the dog teams to meet and assist him on the return trip