| c. 9000 BC | South America | Humans have reached the southernmost tip of South America by now, as shown by carbon-14 dating at the site of Fell's Cave in Patagonia. |
| c. 2300 BC | Babylon, Egypt | The Babylonians portray canals, rivers, and surrounding mountains on clay tablets – the first maps. Egyptian map-making is developing at about the same time. |
| c. 1000 BC | Babylon | A clay tablet is made in Babylon depicting the Earth as a disc surrounded by water with Babylon at its centre – the first map of the world. |
| 530 | Ireland | St Brendan explores the Atlantic in an Irish curragh, or coracle, and is said to have reached America. Early Irish monks certainly reached the Shetland Islands and Iceland. |
| January 1488 | Portugal, Africa | The Portuguese expedition led by Bartolomeu Dias rounds the Cape of Good Hope and enters the Indian Ocean. |
| 17 April 1492 | Spain | Queen Isabella I of Spain contracts to finance a voyage of discovery headed by Christopher Columbus, naming him admiral and viceroy of any discoveries. |
| December 1493 | Spain, Central America | The Spanish expedition led by the explorer Christopher Columbus founds the first European city in the New World, on the island now comprising Haiti and the Dominican Republic, naming it Isabella. Columbus goes on to explore Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Jamaica. |
| 20 May 1498 | India, Portugal | The Portuguese expedition under Vasco da Gama reaches the port of Calicut on the southwest coast of India where it is welcomed by Zamorin, the Hindu ruler, as the first European expedition to sail to India since the Romans. |
| 9 September 1499 | Portugal, Africa, Italy | Vasco da Gama returns to Lisbon, Portugal, from India, having sailed via Malindi, Kenya, and the Azores in the Atlantic Ocean. The other half of his expeditionary force, which arrived in Lisbon a month earlier, has broken the spice trade monopoly of Venice and the Arabs. |
| 1507 | Germany | German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller publishes his Cosmographia Introductio/Introduction to Cosmography, naming the new world ‘America’ after Amerigo Vespucci, the Florentine navigator who first argued the new lands were not part of the Indies. |
| 1511 | Portugal, Ayutthaya | Portuguese navigators, spreading through the Sunda Islands and the South China Sea after their recent conquest of Malacca in Malaysia, reach the Thai kingdom of Ayutthaya. |
| 25 September 1513 | Spain, Central America, Pacific | The members of a Spanish expedition under Vasco Núñez Balboa, governor of Darién (the Panama isthmus), are the first Europeans to sight the Pacific Ocean; on reaching the western shore of present-day Panama, they claim it for Spain. |
| 21 October–28 November 1520 | Spain, South America | The Spanish expedition under the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan negotiates the strait which now bears his name, between the South American continent and the island of Tierra del Fuego. Three ships reach the Pacific Ocean and continue northwest, the fourth having turned back. |
| 24 August 1535–23 June 1537 | Spain, South America | The Spanish conquistador Pedro de Mendoza leads an expedition, commissioned by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, to La Plata (modern Argentina/Uruguay/Paraguay) in search of more Inca wealth. He founds temporary settlements on the sites of Buenos Aires, and then Asunción, but dies a failure on the return voyage (23 June 1537). |
| 21 May 1542 | Spain, North America | After the death of Hernando de Soto, leader of the Spanish expedition to southeastern North America, the remnants of his expedition return to New Spain (Mexico) by raft the following year. With the failure of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado's western expedition, this deters the Spanish from further exploration north of the Caribbean. |
| 15 November 1577–30 November 1580 | England, Central America, South America | The English buccaneer and explorer Francis Drake leads his expedition on the Pelican (later renamed the Golden Hind) round the world, via Cape Horn, to attack Spanish settlements and shipping along the American Pacific coast and to search for the fabled South Sea continent and the Northwest Passage. |
| 17 June 1579 | England, North America | After successful privateering off the coast of Chile and Peru, the English buccaneer and explorer Francis Drake sails north as far as Vancouver Island, then turns back and lands north of the site of the future city of San Francisco, where he proclaims England's sovereignty over New Albion (modern California). |
| 17 April 1610–22 June 1611 | UK, North America | The English explorer Henry Hudson, jointly commissioned by the Muscovy and East India Companies to discover a Northwest Passage to the Pacific, explores Hudson Bay, North America, but is cast adrift by a mutinous crew after the voyage becomes aimless. |
| November 1642–February 1643 | Pacific | Abel Janszoon Tasman, an explorer in the service of the Dutch East India Company, discovers Van Dieman's Land (now Tasmania) and, in December, New Zealand. In January 1643 he sights Tonga and in February he sees the Fiji Islands. |
| 1728 | Asia, North America | Danish navigator Vitus Bering discovers the strait between Siberia and Alaska that now bears his name. |
| 1772 | Ethiopia | Scottish explorer James Bruce explores Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and traces the Blue Nile to its confluence with the White Nile. |
| 25 July 1775 | Pacific | English explorer James Cook returns to England after a second voyage in the South Seas, having completed the first successful west–east circumnavigation of the world. |
| 1776–1779 | Pacific | English explorer James Cook explores the Pacific Ocean. In 1778, he discovers Hawaii, where the indigenous population treat him as a god. Later that year, he passes through the Bering Strait into the Arctic Ocean, searching for the northwest passage to the Atlantic. |
| 13 February 1779 | Pacific | English explorer James Cook returns to Hawaii, where his crew have a disagreement with some of the indigenous population. After a hasty departure, Cook's ship, the Resolution, is damaged, and he is forced to land again, where he is killed in an argument over a stolen boat. |
| 14 January 1820 | Antarctica | English naval officer Edward Bransfield lands on Deception Island in Antarctica, and plants the Union Jack and buries a bottle containing coins there. He sights high, snow-covered mountains to the south on 20 January – the first sighting of mainland Antarctica. |
| 1848–1849 | Africa | German explorers Johann Ludwig Krapf and Johannes Rebmann travel into the interior of Africa from its eastern coast, exploring the region of Kenya, and becoming the first Europeans to sight Mounts Kilimanjaro (Rebmann, May 1848) and Kenya (Krapf, December 1849). |
| 3 November 1855–20 May 1856 | Africa | Scottish missionary and explorer David Livingstone completes his crossing of the African continent by travelling eastwards from Linyanti on the River Zambezi to Quelimane in Portuguese East Africa, visiting and naming the Victoria Falls (17 November 1855) on the way. |
| 1857–1859 | Africa | British explorers John Hanning Speke and Richard Burton explore inland east Africa, becoming the first Europeans to reach Lake Tanganyika (February 1858). Speke continues northwards, and on 30 July 1858 he visits and names Lake Victoria, which he guesses to be the source of the Nile. |
| August 1860–June 1861 | Australia | Irish settler Robert Burke and English surveyor William Wills lead an expedition out of Victoria to cross Australia from south to north. The four-man advance party turns back only a few miles from the coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria and misses the support party in the desert of Cooper Creek; only one member of the expedition, John King, survives. |
| 23 October 1871–14 March 1872 | Africa | Welsh-born US journalist Henry Stanley reaches Lake Tanganyika in Africa in search of the lost Scottish explorer David Livingstone, who he finds at the trading settlement of Ujiji. Together they explore the lake's northern reaches, and establish that it is not the source of the Nile. Livingstone refuses to leave Africa with Stanley. |
| 12 November 1874–12 August 1877 | Africa | Welsh-born US journalist and explorer Henry Stanley explores the shores of Lake Victoria and circumnavigates Lake Tanganyika before travelling down the Congo River (now the Zaïre) to Africa's west coast, establishing beyond argument that Lake Victoria is the principal source of the Nile. |
| 1930 | | US anthropologist Margaret Mead publishes Growing Up in New Guinea. |
| 23 January 1960 | Switzerland | Swiss engineer Jacques Piccard and US Navy lieutenant Don Walsh descend to the bottom of Challenger Deep (10,916 m/35,810 ft), off the Pacific island of Guam, in the bathyscaph Trieste, setting a new undersea record. |
| 11 February 1993 | Antarctica | Sir Ranulph Fiennes and Dr Michael Stroud of Britain complete the first unsupported crossing of Antarctica on foot, having covered 2,160 km/1,350 mi in 95 days. |
