Dennis Schmitt

Dennis Schmitt (born Berkeley, California), is a veteran explorer from UC Berkeley who, in 2005, discovered a new island formed by the retreat of an ice shelf in East Greenland. Uunartoq Qeqertoq, 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:

"We felt the exhilaration of discovery. We were exploring something new. But of course, there was also something scary about what we did there. We were looking in the face of these changes, and all of us were thinking of the dire consequences."

Schmitt is also credited with the July 2007 discovery of the northernmost island on Earth, named Stray Dog West by Holly Wenger. Stray Dog West belongs to a shifting, semi-permanent archipelago locked in the sea ice north of Peary Land in northeast Greenland, named the Stray Dog Islands. The first island of the archipelago was discovered in 1996 by Dennis Schmitt and Bob Palais.