Gunnar Horn

Dr Gunnar Horn (-1946) was a Norwegian petroleum geologist and Arctic explorer. He is most renown as the leader of the Bratvaag Expedition that found the long-lost remains of the Swedish explorer S. A. Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition of 1897 at Kvitøya in 1930.

Dr Horn studied mining at the Norwegian Institute of Technology and petroleum geology at London's Royal School of Mines, and took a PhD in coal petrography at the Berlin Technical University. He was the leading Norwegian authority on coal and petroleum geology in the interwar years. He worked in 1920-23 as a petroleum geologist in Trinidad and Venezuela. In the autumn of 1925, Dr Horn travelled with Johan Braastad to Kaidak Bay on the eastern shores of the Caspian Sea to investigate local oil resources.

After returning from Trinidad, he worked on Norway's Svalbard and Arctic Ocean surveys. That included investigating and analyses all the most important coal measures on Svalbard. In addition to his purely scientific work, Dr Horn also had important practical and administrative duties in the Arctic islands.

During 1930, he headed an expedition with the sealer Bratvaag which found the camp of Swedish Arctic scientist Salomon August Andrée on Kvitøya.

Dr Horn died in 1946 while in charge of building radio stations and beacons in Svalbard. As a "hobby", he mapped limestone caves in Nordland county and published a number of papers on their formation.