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 Harrow School and the University of Bristol. He has participated in guided 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 from Hercules Inlet, a record he held for five days. Using power kites he and his three team mates Andrew Gerber, Paul Landry and Patrick Woodhead, 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,Egingwah, Ookeah, Ootah and Seegloo. Traveling in a similar style to Peary's with Canadian Inuit Dog teams and wooden sledges, Avery set out from Peary's original Base Camp at Cape Columbia on Ellesmere Island with Hugh Dale-Harris, Andrew Gerber, Matty McNair and George Wells 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. However, because global warming is causing the Arctic Ocean to break up earlier every year, the team were unable to retrace Peary's footsteps back to Cape Columbia, a journey which the explorer had claimed to have covered in only 17 days.
Tom Avery is an Appeal Patron for BSES Expeditions, a youth development charity that operates challenging scientific research expeditions to remote wilderness environments.