Farthest North

4 ideas

1. Fram's drift and the farthest-north dash

   In September 1893 Nansen deliberately froze the Fram into the pack ice north of the New Siberian Islands and let the current carry it west across the Arctic Basin for three years. When the drift clearly would not pass over the Pole, he and Hjalmar Johansen left the ship in March 1895 with dogs, sledges and kayaks and reached a record 86°14'N on 8 April before turning back. With no route to the ship, they wintered in a stone-and-walrus-hide hut on Franz Josef Land and met the explorer Frederick Jackson by chance in June 1896, the same summer the Fram broke free near Spitsbergen with all aboard alive.

2. Enlist the hostile force as transport

   Earlier ships had died trying to force a route through the ice. Nansen argued the ice could be used as the vehicle, and his evidence was wreckage from the Jeannette, which sank off Siberia in 1881 and turned up on the southwest coast of Greenland in 1884, showing that a steady current crossed the polar basin. His plan, widely called suicidal, was to drop a ship into that current upstream and let it carry the ship toward the Pole rather than steaming against it.

3. A hull shaped to yield upward

   The Fram's hull was deliberately rounded, smooth and short, with no vertical sides for the ice to grip. When the floes pressed together, the ice slid down the curved hull and squeezed the ship up onto the surface instead of crushing it. It changed the geometry so the destructive force had nothing to push against and instead lifted the ship.

4. Ice drifts to the right of wind

   On the drift, Nansen observed that the pack ice consistently moved 20–40 degrees to the right of the wind's direction, not straight downwind. He reasoned that the Earth's rotation was deflecting the moving ice and water. The expedition's data also showed the Arctic was a deep ocean basin over 3,000 metres deep, not a shallow sea dotted with land.

Save and mark ideas in the app