Farthest North Voyage Changed Opinion of the Northern Ocean

A little more than 100 years ago, the top of the world was one of the planet's great mysteries. Geographers guessed that a solid, unmoving cap of ice covered the northern end of the globe. Fridtjof Nansen and a crew of Norwegian sailors changed that view in the late 1800s, when sea ice entombed their ship for three years.

Nansen was one of Norway's great explorers and later a diplomat who won the Nobel Prize. With the support of Norway's rulers and an atmospheric scientist who speculated that winds should keep massive chunks of northern ice moving in a certain pattern, Nansen and a crew of 12 others sailed north in September of 1893. Their goal was to allow their ship, the ice-resistant Fram, to freeze into the arctic pack ice until winds and ocean currents spit them out into warmer waters. The crewmen loaded the Fram with enough supplies to last five years.

An American misadventure a few years earlier gave Nansen confidence in his mission. The U.S. Navy ship Jeannette froze into ice east of Wrangell Island in 1879. When pressure from ice floes demolished the ship, the U.S. sailors headed for the coast of Siberia. Only 11 of 33 survived. Villagers found the remains of the Jeannette on the eastern coast of Greenland three years after the ship's demise. The wreckage, plus a steady stream of floating trees from Siberia that Greenlanders snagged for firewood, gave Nansen the faith that winds and ocean currents would someday usher the Fram back to liquid water.

He was right. After 1,045 days drifting in a crust of sea ice, the Fram reached open water in August 1896. But Nansen and another crewmember weren't on board for the celebration. More than a year earlier, he, Hjalmar Johansen, and 28 dogs left the frozen ship in an attempt to reach the North Pole, which was 450 miles from the ship.

During the trek, Nansen and Johansen skied while the dogs pulled two heavy sleds over sea ice. In his book, Farthest North, Nansen listed the weights of all supplies they carried in the sleds, including three Norwegian flags (4 ounces) and one 19-pound sleeping bag made of reindeer skin, in which both men slept to share body heat. One notable absence in the sleds was an abundance of dog food. Nansen explained: "I have weighed all the dogs and have come to the conclusion that we can feed them on each other and keep going for about fifty days."

Nansen and Hjalmar failed to find the pole after expending 15 weeks and all 28 dogs on the ice, but they reached Franz Josef Land in August 1895. After wintering in a stone hut, they eventually made it back to Norway.

Roger Colony, Group Leader of the Frontier Research Systems for Global Change at the International Arctic Research Center, wondered about Nansen's bad luck. Armed with modern knowledge about the drift of sea ice and a computer model, Colony once simulated 1,000 possible drift paths of the Fram. Colony discovered that Nansen's failure to reach the pole might have been due in part to the way the Fram drifted while locked in ice. The computer models showed that in nine out of ten possible drifting paths for the Fram, ocean currents and wind would have taken the ship closer to the pole than Nansen and Hjalmar's starting point.

Despite not reaching the pole, Nansen's mission was a scientific success and the inspiration for more than 50 research platforms from different countries that have since frozen into the pack ice. Today, most information about ice movement in the Arctic Basin comes from satellites and buoys that measure wind, temperature, and ice motion as part of the International Arctic Buoy Program.

Nansen had none of these tools, but his 1897 description of the top of the world remains true. He described it as "a continually breaking and shifting expanse of drift ice."