Edmund Stump is a retired professor of exploration at Arizona State University where he taught geology for thirty-seven years. In a research career funded by the National Science Foundation spanning forty years and thirteen Antarctic field seasons, he studied and sampled rocks throughout the 1,500-mile length of the Transantarctic Mountains and collected samples from the Vinson Massif, the highest summit in Antarctica. He is the author of The Roof at the Bottom of the World: Discovering the Transantarctic Mountains.