COLUMN ONE : The Age of Discovery Isn’t Over : A new breed of physically tough explorers is taking on the planet’s geographic challenges. A British society recently estimated a third of Earth’s land is untouched.

Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes and a scientist companion recently walked across the continent of Antarctica, 1,336 miles of snow and ice, dragging all their food and gear on sleds for 95 days.

For his trouble, the 49-year-old British explorer, whose triple-barreled moniker dates back to the 11th-Century Norman invasion of Britain, earned ulcerating blisters, bacterial sores, an infected foot, piles, sensory deprivation, severe loss of weight, dehydration, snow blindness and frostbite on his nose and toes.

He also earned the record for the first unaided crossing of Antarctica and for the longest polar journey. And for each mile walked, Britons contributed to the fight against multiple sclerosis, donating about $3 million.

At London’s prestigious, 163-year-old Royal Geographical Society, linked to so many of the great feats of exploration in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, Director John Hemming says, “A feat like Ran Fiennes’ raises the whole image of exploration--and fires the public imagination.”

Not that the business of exploration needs much of a boost, it seems. Like Britain’s famous mountaineer George Leigh Mallory, who set out to scale Mt. Everest because “it is there”--and disappeared in the attempt--modern explorers are still taking on the planet’s geographic challenges, often for no better reason than because they exist.

These hardy souls are still climbing precipitous peaks and plumbing the ocean bottom, crossing vast polar icecaps and blazing deserts, burrowing through dense rain forests on expeditions to explore, discover, research. In their ranks are adventurers, scientists, writers, self-publicists and mere stuntmen.

Hemming says that the Royal Geographical Society is seeing more inquiries and applications for its exploration grants than ever, 500 last year.

Sitting in his spacious office in the society’s headquarters overlooking London’s Hyde Park, at the oak table on which African explorer Dr. David Livingstone wrote his book, “Missionary Travels,” Hemming says: “More is being explored; more is being discovered. Explorers are better educated, better trained, with better equipment.”

Fiennes’ exploit has been matched in other areas by a new breed of physically tough explorers, among them:

* Italy’s Reinhold Messner, 48, who has climbed all peaks higher than 8,000 meters (26,247 feet) without oxygen equipment.

* Germany’s Arved Fuchs, 39, who walked to both North and South poles in a single year.

* Frenchman Philippe Frey, 35, who trekked across the Sahara Desert from the Red Sea to the Atlantic Ocean with a couple of camels.

* Norway’s Erling Kagge, who skied solo to the South Pole.

* American Will Steger, 48, who crossed Antarctica by dog sled and led the first confirmed expedition to the North Pole on foot. (Adm. Robert E. Peary’s generally credited claim of reaching the North Pole in 1909 has recently been questioned by some scientists.)

* California’s Sylvia Earle, 57, an undersea explorer, who holds records for deep diving.

With so much activity, will explorers soon exhaust destinations on planet Earth that offer challenges testing their curiosity and endurance?

Hemming thinks not. A recent study for the society estimated that a third of the Earth’s land area is still untouched by humans, he says.

“The greatest age of discovery has been in our own lifetime,” he observes. “Scientists have found out more about what is happening on this planet in recent years--looking closely at polar regions, rain forests, deserts, wetlands, under the ocean surface--than ever before.”

But, he adds, “there is very much to do.”

Not all adventurers are interested in research: Men have pedal-boated across the Atlantic and Pacific; a cyclist once reached 18,000 feet on Mt. Everest; a balloonist once sailed over the mountain.

Three months ago, a Japanese piano tuner floated over the Pacific in a gondola suspended from balloons, heading for San Francisco. He has not been seen since.

Hemming, himself an explorer specializing in the upper Amazon rain forest and a historian, says that these days the society is mainly interested in science and that the trend in exploration is toward research rather than physical heroics.

“It’s sometimes difficult to do much science going from A to B; science needs time, not motion,” he says.

He hastens to add that he’s not putting Fiennes in that category. Besides being an inspiration, he says, Fiennes is “very serious and not a stuntman; his partner, Dr. Michael Stroud, is quite a good scientist.”

The Fiennes-Stroud expedition not only set a distance record for polar terrain, crossing the South Pole, but it was also the longest unaided antarctic journey.

“Unaided” to explorers means walking with all supplies--absolutely no machines or pack animals and no outside help such as airdropped provisions or supply dumps along the way. Fiennes and Stroud pulled their equipment and supplies by shoulder harness, starting out with 485 pounds of food and gear apiece.

Their journey took them from sea level up to 11,000 feet and back down. They had actually passed the end of the continent and were onto an ice shelf before they finally radioed for help in February.

By then, they were half dead, suffering from hypothermia, too weak to tackle the crevasses of the Ross Ice Shelf.

“After 29 years of leading expeditions to remote goals, hot and cold, this endeavor has proved by far the most difficult, unpleasant, nasty and near lethal,” recalls Fiennes, now recovering in his modest London house. “It was too cold, too high, too heavy. The last six days, the wind chill was minus 80 degrees.

“Only a great deal of luck enabled us to complete our main objectives and get out just before the oncoming antarctic winter cut us off,” he says. “But the scientific research program of Mike Stroud--studying the effects of extreme temperature on the human body--has been wholly successful.”

Fiennes is Central Casting’s idea of an explorer: Tall and strikingly handsome, he was educated at Eton, served as an officer with the Royal Scots Greys and the Special Air Service and fought insurgents in Oman.

As an explorer, he has gone up the White Nile, parachuted onto Europe’s highest glacier, paddled up rapids-filled rivers in northern Canada and Alaska, walked overland to the North Pole and trekked to both poles. He also played a role in finding the lost city of Ubar in Oman.

His feats have led the Guinness Book of World Records to hail him as the “world’s greatest living explorer.” He has written 10 books and received an array of exploration awards, including the Founder’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society.

The society is the oldest institution backing expeditions like Fiennes’. Its 11,000 members have at their disposal a library of 125,000 books and 450 geographical periodicals; a map collection with about 1 million maps and charts and close to 5,000 atlases; a photo section with about 400,000 pictures; archives recording the history of British exploration since the society’s founding in 1830.

On hand too are remnants of antarctic explorer Capt. Robert F. Scott’s provisions--curry powder, tea, salt, chocolate--as well as his skis and sled from the camp where he and his companions died on their ill-fated journey to reach the South Pole in 1911-12.

These collections were amassed and consulted by some of the greatest explorers of the 19th and 20th centuries: African specialists like Livingstone and the newspaperman who went looking for him, Henry M. Stanley; polar adventurers like Scott and Sir Ernest H. Shackleton; Arabists like Sir Richard Burton and Wilfred Thesiger; mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary, who, with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, in 1953 reached the 29,028-foot summt of Everest, Earth’s highest peak.

For explorers, a key branch of the society is its Expedition Advisory Center, which provides information, training and encouragement to anyone planning an overseas expedition. It also helps to line up institutional and commercial sponsors to fund expeditions.

In addition, the center assists the adventurous projects of the next generation of scientific leaders: mountaineering, caving, underwater and canoe expeditions. It produces dozens of publications on all kinds of expeditions, including an explorer’s bible, the Expedition Planners’ Handbook & Directory.

“Using the center,” Hemming says, “hundreds of such expeditions leave Britain every year, making an important contribution to global environment knowledge and understanding.”

Among the society’s projects are several major undertakings: research in Brazil’s Maraca rain forest, which uncovered 250 new species of invertebrate; work in the Mkomazi Reserve in Tanzania to restore elephant herds; a Nepal study to learn the effects of mountain erosion on downstream lands and rivers, and a new expedition to determine whether the Jordanian desert can bloom again.

The society’s most famous counterpart is the National Geographic Society in Washington, whose financial help for expeditions and scientific research dates back more than 100 years. Since 1890, it has supported nearly 5,000 research projects.

The National Geographic Society, perhaps best known through its yellow-bordered magazine, has given grants for Peary’s polar expedition; the 1934 C. William Beebe and Otis Barton bathysphere ocean descent; the 1935 stratospheric balloon flight of Army captains Albert W. Stevens and Orvil A. Anderson; Adm. Richard E. Byrd’s polar exploits, and the 1956 Operation Deep Freeze antarctic expedition of Rear Adm. George J. Dufek, the first American to set foot on the South Pole.

It also supported Jacques Cousteau’s oceanographic research and the Leakey family’s discoveries of man’s early ancestors in Africa.

Hemming says he sees an encouraging trend in Britain: “Geography has become a quite glamorous subject to study. It has overtaken history in many of our school tests because it appeals to young people interested in the environment.

“Indeed, geography encompasses the most urgent global issues and challenges of the 1990s--including environmental degradation, expanding human populations, nature conservation, climatic change and discoveries all over our planet.”

One of the more unusual expeditions now being planned is a French-Nepalese team’s effort to clear the trash left behind by other climbers on Everest: oxygen bottles, food cans, tents, ropes and other material, all discarded by climbers on their way down.

Applauding the mission, the British climber Chris Bonington spoke recently of the almost spiritual lift he got when scaling Everest: “the beauty so ethereal, as if the world was empty.” But on the way down, he said, he walked through a “rubbish dump of hundreds of empty oxygen bottles, the tattered skeletons of abandoned tents, remains of food and empty boxes. It was ugly and squalid, in many ways a microcosm of all that we have done to our planet.”

So exploration increasingly is attracting adventurers who care more about the environment than about chalking up records.

But the dramatic feats of derring-do still capture the imagination. Asked about their motives, explorers speak of coming to grips with the unknown.

Sir Laurens van der Post, an 86-year-old writer and explorer of southern Africa’s Kalahari Desert, says, “I found that the great attraction in going into unknown places was that I went into unknown places in my mind and spirit as well, things I couldn’t do at home.”

Bonington, 58, says: “My fascination was with the unknown, the thrill of risk, the satisfaction of getting your body to do very, very difficult things--and the sheer beauty of it all. There’s also a dash of ego--to be first.”

And Fiennes, after talking about scientific achievement, charity and patriotism, quotes fellow polar explorer Wally Herbert, who wrote:

“Of what value was this journey? It is as well for those who ask such a question that there are others who feel the answer and never need to ask.”

Financial Help for the Fearless

So you think you have the mental, physical and spiritual wherewithal to set off on a grand adventure? There are at least two notable sources of aid for serious adventurers--and the emphasis is on serious :

The Royal Geographical Society, London, has set aside a fund for grants for trips with a scientific or research nature. Applicants tend to be undergraduates or mature scientists.

They must submit a detailed, 12-page application and are subjected to interviews by a panel of noted scientists and explorers, who make recommendations to the society’s Expeditions Committee, which awards varying sums.

For more information, contact: The Grants Secretary, Royal Geographical Society, 1 Kensington Gore, London SW7 2AR. Telephone: 44 71 589 5466

The National Geographic Society, Washington, budgets $5.65 million for basic, original scientific field research, awarding grants averaging $15,000 to $20,000 annually.

It favors “research that relates to environmental concerns and has relevance to global geographical issues.”

Applicants tend to hold advanced degrees (Ph.Ds) and are associated with institutions of higher education, or other scientific or educational, nonprofit organizations or museums. Those seeking grants must briefly describe their proposals when seeking an application and must provide a current curriculum-vitae.

For more information, contact: Steven S. Stettes, Secretary, Committee for Research and Exploration, National Geographic Society, 17th and M Streets NW, Washington, D.C. 20036