Dennis Schmitt
Dennis Schmitt (born Berkeley, California), is a veteran explorer and adventurer from University of California, Berkeley.
Biography
Schmitt grew up in Berkeley, California, the son of mixed German and American parentage. His father was a plumber. He showed early aptitude with languages, music and mathematics, and went on to study linguistics with Noam Chomsky in his late teens. Chomsky recruited Schmitt, aged 19, to travel to Alaska's Brooks Range and attempt to learn the Nunamiut dialect.
Schmitt speaks ten languages, including Russian, Norwegian, Danish, and French. Schmitt lived for four years at an Alaskan Eskimo village named Anaktuvuk Pass before leading expeditions, including the Sierra Club.
In 2003, Schmitt discovered one of the candidates of being the northernmost land in the world. Deciding that Greenland should name its own islands, he simply called it "83-42", a name that has remained.
Two years later, in 2005, Schmitt discovered a new island formed by the retreat of an ice shelf in East Greenland. Uunartoq Qeqertaq, Inuit for "The Warming Island", lies 400 miles north of the Arctic Circle. The Sierra Club reported on a Schmitt quote to the New York Times:
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