Andrey Petrovich Kapitsa was a Russia

Russia

Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

n geographer

Geographer

A geographer is a scholar whose area of study is geography, the study of Earth's natural environment and human society.Although geographers are historically known as people who make maps, map making is actually the field of study of cartography, a subset of geography...

. His father was Pyotr Kapitsa

Pyotr Kapitsa

Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa was a prominent Soviet/Russian physicist and Nobel laureate.-Biography:Kapitsa was born in the city of Kronstadt and graduated from the Petrograd Polytechnical Institute in 1918. He worked for over ten years with Ernest Rutherford in the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge...

, and his maternal grandfather was Aleksey Krylov.

Kapitsa was born in Cambridge

Cambridge

The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...

, United Kingdom

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

, and graduated from Moscow State University

Moscow State University

Lomonosov Moscow State University , previously known as Lomonosov University or MSU , is the largest university in Russia. Founded in 1755, it also claims to be one of the oldest university in Russia and to have the tallest educational building in the world. Its current rector is Viktor Sadovnichiy...

 in 1953. He is credited with the discovery and naming of Lake Vostok

Lake Vostok

Lake Vostok is the largest of more than 140 subglacial lakes found under the surface of Antarctica. The overlying ice provides a continuous paleoclimatic record of 400,000 years, although the lake water itself may have been isolated for 15 to 25 million years. The lake is named after the...

, the largest subglacial lake

Subglacial lake

A subglacial lake is a lake under a glacier, typically an ice cap or ice sheet. There are many such lakes, with Lake Vostok in Antarctica being by far the largest known at present.-Characteristics:...

 in Antarctica, which lies 4,000 meters below the continent's icecap

Icecap

Icecap my refer to* Ice cap, a geographical feature* Icecap , a blog skeptical of global warming* Raleigh IceCaps, a defunct ECHL Hockey Team...

. Kapitsa was a participant in four Soviet expedition

Expedition

An expedition typically refers to a long journey or voyage undertaken for a specific purpose, often exploratory, scientific, geographic, military or political in nature...

s to Antarctica between 1955 and 1964. He was elected into the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1970 and was honored with a USSR State Prize

USSR State Prize

The USSR State Prize was the Soviet Union's state honour. It was established on September 9, 1966. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, the prize was followed up by the State Prize of the Russian Federation....

two years later. Kapitsa died in Moscow on 2 August 2011 at the age of 80.