The Second Soviet Antarctic Expedition was led by Aleksei Treshnikov on the continent; the marine expedition on the "Ob" was led by I. V. Maksimov. The "Ob" left Kaliningrad on 7 November, 1956.
Three ships were used to transport the expedition, all diesel-electric. The two main ships were as for the first expedition: RV Ob (flagship; captain I. A. Man) and RV "Lena" (captain A. I. Vetrov). The third ship was Kooperatsiya (captain A. S. Yantselevich), used mainly as a transport vessel.
The tasks of the expedition were:
- Relief of the first expedition
- Full scale scientific work for the International Geophysical Year (IGY) This included glacier mapping and wildlife tracking, among other things.
- Organisation of two IGY scientific stations near the south geomagnetic pole and pole of relative inaccessibility
- An inland tractor-sledge traverse for glaciology
- Oceanography
List of features named by the expedition
- Lena Passage, named after the ship Lena
- Lednikov Bay (Bukhta Lednikovaya), named for location
References
- A V Nudel Man Soviet Antarctic Expeditions 1955–1959, Izdatel'stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, Moskva, 1959 (translated from the Russian by the Israel program for scientific translations, Jerusalem, 1966 for the National Science Foundation).
| Preceded by First | Soviet Antarctic expeditions | Succeeded by Third |