Steffen Graupner

Steffen was born in Jena, Germany. After becoming a precision mechanic, he studied physics, geophysics, meteorology, and geology in Jena and Leeds, U.K. After his studies, he worked on active volcanoes in South America, Indonesia, Kamchatka and East Africa, as a researching volcanologist and travel journalist.​

Steffen saw glacial ice for the first time in 1995 in the mountains of Central Asia, climbing the 7000 m summits of the Pamir and Tienshan, which led him to begin his career as a mountain guide. The remote ranges of Inner Asia lured him to explore the Afghan Hindukush in 2008 and 2016. He was the first foreigner since the 1970s to explore the eastern districts of Afghanistan’s Wakhan corridor and the first climber to reach the highest summit in the region, Koh-e-Wakhan at 6094 m.​

From the passion for the vertical ice, Steffen developed a love of the horizontal ice of the Polar Regions. After a skiing expedition on the frozen Bering Strait of Chukotka, he was invited to explore Chukotka’s heartland and visited the reindeer nomads in the restricted interior. From there Steffen’s interests extended to the rugged coasts and seas of the Russian Arctic, Far East, and North Pole. Since 2014 he has completed six voyages in the Northeast Passage.​

Steffens Arctic experiences have recently earned him recognition as Senior Polar Guide with PTGA and participation in the MOSAiC Expedition in 2019/20. Following the course of Fridtjof Nansen’s expedition of the1890s, the German research Icebreaker Polarstern drifted beset in Arctic pack ice for one year, collecting critical climatic and oceanographic data from the Central Arctic Ocean.