Maria Klenova

Maria Klenova
Native name	Мари́я Васи́льевна Клёнова
Born	1898
Died	1976
Nationality	Russian , Soviet
Fields	Marine Geology
Institutions	Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, USSR Academy of Sciences
Known for	Seabed mapping
Notes
A founder of Russian marine science and the first to fully map the seabed of the Barents Sea.

Maria Vasilyevna Klenova (Russian: Мари́я Васи́льевна Клёнова) (1898 – 1976) was a Russian and Soviet marine geologist and one of the founders of Russian marine science and contributor to the first Soviet Antarctic atlas.

Klenova studied to become a professor and later on worked as a member of the Council for Antarctic Research of the USSR Academy of Sciences. During that time she spent nearly thirty years researching in the Polar Regions and become the first woman scientist to do research in Antarctica. She joined in the First Soviet Antarctic Expedition (1955-57) and worked with ANARE (Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions) at Macquarie Island.

Klenova began her marine geology career in 1925 as a researcher aboard the Soviet research vessel Perseus, attached to the Floating Marine Research Institute (precursor to the present-day Nikolai M. Knipovich Polar Research Institute of Marine Fisheries and Oceanography) in the Barents Sea and the archipelagos of Novaya Zemlya, Spitsbergen, and Franz Josef Land. In 1933 Klenova produced the first complete seabed map of the Barents Sea. She identified and named the Barents abyssal plain (85ºN, 40ºE) after the Dutch polar explorer Willem Barentsz (or Barents) who died in 1597 on his third expedition to find the Northeast Passage.

In 1949 Klenova became a senior research associate at the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Her work included analyses of seabed geology in the Atlantic Ocean and the Antarctic, and in the Caspian, Barents and White Seas. In the austral summer of 1956 she traveled with a Soviet oceanographic team to map uncharted areas of the Antarctic coast.