Lincoln Ellsworth (born May 12, 1880,Chicago,Illinois, U.S.—died May 26, 1951,New York, New York) was an American explorer, engineer, and scientist who led the first trans-Arctic (1926) and trans-Antarctic (1935) air crossings.

A wealthy adventurer, Ellsworth was a surveyor and engineer inCanada for five years (1903–08), worked for three years with the U.S. Biological Survey, and served in the U.S. Army inWorld War I, training as an aviator. In 1924 he led theJohns Hopkins University (Baltimore, Maryland) trans-Andean topographic survey from theAmazon Riverbasin over theAndes Mountains to thePacific Ocean shores ofPeru.

Fascinated with polar air exploration, Ellsworth financed and accompanied two such expeditions with the Norwegian explorerRoald Amundsen. On the first (1925) they reached latitude 87°44′ N in two amphibian planes; an emergency landing without radio caused them to be given up for lost. With 30 days of grim effort, they carved out a takeoff field on the rough polarice pack, after which one plane, overloaded with the total party of six, returned to Spitsbergen (in theSvalbard archipelago), off northernNorway. The following year Ellsworth and Amundsen, along with the Italian explorerUmberto Nobile, made the firsttraverse of theArctic basin in the dirigibleNorge—a 3,393-mile (5,463-km) journey from Spitsbergen toAlaska that won worldwide acclaim. In 1931 Ellsworth made an 800-mile (1,300-km) canoe trip through centralLabrador and later that year, for the American Geographical Society, made flights overFranz Josef Land andNovaya Zemlya—Arctic islands north of what was then theSoviet Union (nowRussia).

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In late 1935, on the third of four private expeditions toAntarctica, Ellsworth and Canadian pilotHerbert Hollick-Kenyon flew across the continent from theAntarctic Peninsula to the abandonedLittle America base on theRoss Ice Shelf. The two, often beset by bad weather, flew for some two weeks, and their plane ran out of fuel before they got to the base. They reached it only after aharrowing 11-day journey on foot and eventually were retrieved in mid-January 1936 by a party sent out to find them. The area they covered during the flight, including the Sentinel Range of the Ellsworth Mountains, is now namedEllsworth Land andMarie Byrd Land. In 1939 he again flew over Antarctica and named theAmerican Highland in theIndian Ocean quadrant.