We were fighting sleet and wind after yet another fruitless day hunting for fossils on Canada’s Ellesmere Island. It was July 2000, and our scientific target was the fish with arms and legs but, with our existing haul of only a handful of ancient bones and scales, we were still years from eventual success. More immediately, the three of us were a strenuous hike from camp. Our tents were set near the head of a narrow fiord, where a miles‑long tongue of pack ice was engulfed by steep red sandstone cliffs.
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The return hike presented us with two options: either fight slippery boulders and scree slopes along the cliffs for the five miles back to camp, or follow raised beaches and watch out for polar bears on the adjacent pack ice. Knowing that walking miles over ice‑ covered rubble was a recipe for torn knee ligaments, we decided to take our chances with the bears.
Our beach traverse was interrupted by a prominent dark shape on the horizon. The sighting was unusual: with no trees, power lines, or buildings to mark perspective, it could have been a moderate-sized entity half a mile away or a huge one four miles distant. Worried that it was a lone bear working the coast, or perhaps a wayward musk ox, we glassed it with our binoculars. The situation became stranger still. The object in our eyepieces was sitting stationary on the beach.
Nansen wanted to be the first person to see the extreme north, but he knew that conventional means wouldn’t likely get him there.
As we approached, the apparition came into clearer focus. It wasn’t a single object; it was composed of collapsed wooden boards and slats weathered by the wind. We were now confronted with a mystery. Clearly somebody had taken great care to pile this debris here, but we were more than 300 miles from the nearest human settlement, an Inuit community of about 160 year‑round residents. This presence became mysterious: with no roads, trails, or local landing strips, the only way in or out is by helicopter or on foot.
Looking closely, we saw that a few wooden strips were covered with print that was faded with time and exposure. The string of consonants in each word suggested the text was likely Scandinavian. The wood of the crates was windblown and worn gray, clearly having endured many Arctic winters of wind, snow, and extreme cold. The slats were not the only aspect that looked old. The nails that held the crates together had been pounded by hand, clearly made before factories could mass‑produce them.
The weathering of the wood, the nails crafted before the Industrial Age, and Scandinavian text pointed to one possibility: we were standing near objects frozen in time like the fish fossils we were hoping to find. Once we understood what the broken and weathered boards represented, we stood in silent reverence: these were lost artifacts of one of the greatest episodes of exploration and scientific discovery in all of human history. And the story began more than a century before our hike on that beach.
In the mid‑19th century, Fridtjof Nansen trained as a scientist and oceanographer and wrote seminal treatises on the nervous systems of marine creatures for his dissertation. He was a man of immensely broad talents—a champion skier and skater in his youth, Nansen developed a passion for outdoor exploration. His interests coalesced in a profound attraction to explore northern polar regions. The object of his first quest was Greenland, which, in Nansen’s time, had not yet been crossed east to west.
In a departure from the standard procedure for polar expeditions, which consisted of large, heavily supplied crews, he took a small team of expert skiers from the eastern side of the island hundreds of miles across the ice cap to the western side. His success established him as a major player in polar research and lit a fire that was to consume him in the following decades. His achievement was also a confirmation of his approach to polar logistics. Nansen viewed other expeditions as bloated by big crews with unnecessary gear; his plans would be lean and mean, borrowing techniques from alpine populations and Inuit communities.
Nansen returned to Norway in 1889 with an entirely new quest in mind: to be the first person to travel to the North Pole. This desire was as much to achieve scientific breakthroughs as it was for the glory of conquest. At the time, the polar north remained a land of mystery and tragedy. Speculations, bordering on wild fantasies, about the region abounded. The extent to which land, ocean, and ice extended to the North Pole was in dispute. Hundreds of explorers had already been lost as their ships sank, they succumbed to scurvy, or they ran out of supplies during long winters in the ice. Nansen wanted to be the first person to see the extreme north, but he knew that conventional means wouldn’t likely get him there.
Nansen was a student of polar logistics and found inspiration in unlikely places. In 1870, the US Navy joined the international fervor to make a run for the North Pole. They retrofitted a British ship, renamed it the Jeanette, and established a crew led by a young prodigy, Lieutenant Commander George De Long. The Jeanette set off along a route that took it from the Bering Sea near Alaska west to Siberia. But after two years, the ship got stuck in pack ice. After the crew depleted most of its supplies, the ship was crushed by the floes. Some of the crew returned south intact. But De Long, along with twelve others, perished on the expedition in 1872.
Years after the death of De Long and his crew, the tragedy of the Jeanette provided constant reminders of the dangers of Arctic exploration. In 1884, Inuit reported finding broken boards, kitchenware, and other wreckage from the Jeanette along the coastline of Greenland. Somehow the debris drifted more than 1,000 miles in four years. To the polar exploration community, the artifacts of a lost expedition strewn across the Arctic were a cautionary tale. To Nansen, the debris formed the germ of a plan.
Nansen asked: What if the transport of the Jeanette wreckage reflected a steady current that ran from Siberia all the way to Greenland? What if he could design a sturdy ship that could resist being crushed by ice and could be carried by the current toward the North Pole? The idea was to let the current do most of the work to get him north, and then, as he hit ice, Nansen would make a short sledge run to the pole. He paid attention to even the smallest detail of his new project and studied Inuit ways of life for design inspiration for his sledges, cooking stoves, clothes, and other expeditionary gear.
Venturing the farthest north, farthest south, and then north again, the Fram catalyzed decades of discovery in the Arctic and Antarctic.
Nansen set off to find funding for his idea. Presenting his plan to the Royal Geographic Society, then a home for most active and retired polar explorers, Nansen was met with a combination of skepticism, concern for his mental health, and outright derision. The famed American polar explorer Adolphus Greely, himself no stranger to polar tragedy, having led an expedition whose stranded survivors supposedly partook in cannibalism, proclaimed Nansen’s idea an “illogical scheme of self‑destruction.”
But Nansen knew that an attempt for the North Pole could stir national pride. He concentrated his efforts at home and gave a rousing speech to Norway’s parliament focusing on his country’s special relationship to the pole, and the ways that its citizens were uniquely capable of attaining it. He ended up getting support from both the government and Norway’s royal family to build a ship and hire a crew made up exclusively of Norwegians.
With funding in hand, Nansen hired one of the most renowned naval architects of the time to design a ship that was small, nimble, and sturdy, with a rounded bottom that would allow it to ride above the ice that would have crushed other ships. He named it the Fram, Norwegian for “forward.”
In 1883, Nansen launched a three‑year expedition to drift north in the Fram with the current, then sledge toward the pole. The Fram drifted thousands of miles, with the only problem being, as Nansen described it, “deathly boredom.” When the ship reached the farthest north the current could take it, Nansen and a companion left the Fram to sledge the remaining way to the pole. While he didn’t attain his goal, Nansen got farther north than had yet been recorded. And unlike any other expedition to date, Nansen’s suffered not a single casualty or notable mishap. Nansen returned a hero and later switched careers to diplomacy, ultimately winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922 for his efforts rescuing refugees, including Armenian victims of genocide.
Nansen’s voyage resulted in a six‑volume treatise on the polar north, revealing that polar exploration is itself a science, with gear, logistics, and training reflecting studies of human physiology and methods developed by Indigenous Peoples. The Fram was to see two other expeditions. One was to take Roald Amundsen south for his successful attempt on the South Pole. The other took a small crew with a different Norwegian leader to Canada’s Ellesmere Island to study polar geography, natural history, and climate in 1902. The smashed crates we encountered that July day in 2000 were from when the Fram explored our fiord during the 1902 expedition. We imagined that the crates had likely held supplies.
For me, the smallest discovery made by the Fram’s team was the most significant. As the Fram probed into what eventually became the Canadian Arctic islands, the youngest scientist on board, the ship’s natural historian, found tiny fish scales inside the rocks of one of the fiords. These were from the extinct fish species that my colleagues and I were finding fossils of in the same fiord nearly a hundred years later. And that sledge that Nansen had designed using Inuit design concepts? I was to use a modern version of the Nansen sledge when I later ventured to Antarctica on my own expeditions on the polar plateau.
The shattered crates we saw on the fiord that July day in 2000 were a vivid symbol of scientific discovery in polar regions. Venturing the farthest north, farthest south, and then north again, the Fram catalyzed decades of discovery in the Arctic and Antarctic.
And the Fram expedition achieved something else: Nansen revealed a world of ice at the North Pole. To some, this revelation would have been the biggest surprise of all.
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From Ends of the Earth: Journeys to the Polar Regions in Search of Life, the Cosmos, and Our Future by Neil Shubin. Published by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Neil Shubin.
