Alec Trendall

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Alec Trendall (8 December 1928 – 4 April 2013) was an English geologist, poet, and explorer. He is best known for mapping the island of South Georgia and for surveying Western Australia’s geology.

He was born in Enfield, Middlesex. He studied geology at Imperial College London, graduating in 1949, and earned a PhD from the University of Liverpool. He worked as the geologist on the South Georgia Survey expeditions in 1951–52 and 1953–54, led by Duncan Carse. A nearby peak, Trendall Crag (1,005 m), overlooking Drygalski Fjord on South Georgia, was named after him. In 2011 he published Putting South Georgia on the Map, a full account of the surveys. The Scott Polar Research Institute holds a digitised archive with 305 images of Trendall, including a photo of a bergschrund incident during the first expedition.

Trendall was Director of the Geological Survey of Western Australia from 1969 to 1989. He discovered Trendall Reserve in the Eastern Pilbara in 1984, a site that contains evidence of some of the oldest known fossils, stromatolites.