Nansen’s Fram expedition

Nansen’s Fram expedition of 1893–1896 was an attempt by the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen to reach the geographical North Pole. Nansen took his ship Fram to the New Siberian Islands in the eastern Arctic Ocean, froze her into the pack ice, and waited for the drift to carry her towards the pole. After 18 months Nansen and a chosen companion, Hjalmar Johansen, left the ship with a team of dogs and sledges and made for the Pole. They did not reach it, but they achieved a record Farthest North latitude of 86°13. 6′N before a long retreat over ice and water to reach safety in Franz Josef Land. Meanwhile, Fram continued to drift west

About Nansen’s Fram expedition in brief

Nansen’s Fram expedition of 1893–1896 was an attempt by the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen to reach the geographical North Pole. In the face of much discouragement from other polar explorers, Nansen took his ship Fram to the New Siberian Islands in the eastern Arctic Ocean, froze her into the pack ice, and waited for the drift to carry her towards the pole. After 18 months Nansen and a chosen companion, Hjalmar Johansen, left the ship with a team of dogs and sledges and made for the Pole. They did not reach it, but they achieved a record Farthest North latitude of 86°13. 6′N before a long retreat over ice and water to reach safety in Franz Josef Land. Meanwhile, Fram continued to drift westward, finally emerging in the North Atlantic Ocean. The scientific observations carried out during this period contributed significantly to the new discipline of oceanography, which subsequently became the main focus of Nansen’s scientific work. Although Nansen retired from exploration after this expedition, the methods of travel and survival he developed with Johansen influenced all the polar expeditions, north and south, which followed in the subsequent three decades. The idea for the expedition had arisen after items from the American vessel Jeannette, which had sunk off the north coast of Siberia in 1881, were discovered three years later off the south-west coast of Greenland. Based on this and other debris recovered from the Greenland coast, the meteorologist Henrik Mohn developed a theory of transpolar drift.

Nansen supervised the construction of a vessel with a rounded hull and other features designed to withstand prolonged pressure from ice. The ship was rarely threatened during her long imprisonment, and emerged unscathed after three years. The expedition proved conclusively that there were no significant land masses between the Eurasian continents and the North Pole, and confirmed the general character of the north polar region as a deep, ice-covered sea. In a lecture given in 1884 to the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, one of the founders of modern meteorology, Dr. Henrik. Mohn argued that the finding of the Jeannettes relics indicated the existence of an ocean current flowing from east to west across the entire Arctic Ocean. The Danish governor of Julianehaab, writing of the find, surmised that an expedition frozen into the Siberian sea might, if its ship were to prove strong enough, cross the polar ocean and land in South Greenland. In February 1890 Nansen addressed a meeting of the Norwegian Geographical Society in Oslo. After drawing attention to the failures of the many expeditions which had approached the north pole, he announced his plans to return from Greenland shortly after his return from Alaska. In 1888 Nansen remembered the east–west Arctic drift theory and its inherent possibilities for further exploration, and shortly after he was ready to announce his plans for the first crossing of the Greenland ice cap, an objective which he achieved in 1888–89.

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