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 [
ru])) 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
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).