Here's why this Canadian hill was named after a Bengali geologist, Sharat Kumar Roy!

Did you know this hill in the Arctic, Mount Sharat, located some thousands of kilometres away from Bengal, resonates with the name of a Bengali paleontologist and army personnel, Sharat Kumar Roy?

Who was Sharat Kumar Roy and why was a mountain named after him?

Baffin Island, located in the Canadian High Arctic, is the fifth largest island in the world. In this land which sees the polar nights to the midnight sun, and just a handful of Inuit communities living, you can’t miss but spot a hill named after a Bengali Major.

While this island remains a largely untouched Arctic adventure destination, shaped by sheer coastal cliffs, glacier-carved fjords, and remote headlands that define its dramatic landscape, within this vast terrain, far beyond the usual routes, surrounded by wind, rock, and ice, Mount Sharat stands tall at about 1,600 feet (488 meters), situated around 5 miles west of Bay of Two Rivers, near the shores of Frobisher Bay.

But, what strikes a chord is definitely the word/name sharat, literally translating to autumn in Bengali. 

So how did this hill get associated with Sharat Kumar Roy? 

Sharat Kumar Roy, born in Bengal in 1897, studied in Hazaribagh and later in Calcutta, followed a strong academic path that shaped his early years. However, his life took a turn during World War I, when he served his stint in the British Indian Army., extending his journey beyond India, first to London and then to the United States, after the war.

In the US, Sharat focused deeply on geology, carried out his research, and eventually earned a PhD in Chicago, while building his work around understanding the Earth and its history.

He spent a year with the geology department of the New York State Museum in Albany before he moved on to join the geology department of the Field Museum of Natural History in 1925 as an assistant curator of geology. And that was the beginning of a stellar life.

In 1927, he joined the Rawson–MacMillan Arctic Expedition, which took him to Labrador and Baffin Island for over a year, marking his direct association with the Arctic. Notably he is also the first Indian to go on polar expeditions to North Pole.

During this time, he worked on frozen ground, studying rock formations and collecting fossils that revealed stories from deep geological time, and continued to return to the region, working across Labrador, Newfoundland, and Baffin Island. 

He served with the United States Army as a captain in the India-Burma Theatre. Near the end of the war, he took a month-long leave to collect fossils (including Permian brachiopods) from the Salt Range in what was then Punjab.

Soon after the war, his contributions were recognised at the Field Museum of Natural History, where he became the chief curator of geology at the museum. Later, he made several  expeditions to Central America in pursuit of volcanoes, drawn to their unpredictability.

Years after his work in the Arctic, something unexpected appeared on an official chart by the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey—a small but striking detail on the edge of Frobisher Bay: Mount Sharat. A peak named after the indomitable Sharat Kumar Roy. 

For more updates, join/follow our WhatsApp, Telegram and YouTube channels.