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Nansen's ''Fram'' expedition was an 1893–1896 attempt by the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen to reach the geographical North Pole by harnessing the natural east–west current of the Arctic Ocean. 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. Impatient with the slow speed and erratic character of the drift, 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 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. The wreckage had obviously been carried across the polar ocean, perhaps across the pole itself. Based on this and other debris recovered from the Greenland coast, the meteorologist Henrik Mohn developed a theory of transpolar drift, which led Nansen to believe that a specially designed ship could be frozen in the pack ice and follow the same track as the ''Jeannette'' wreckage, thus reaching the vicinity of the pole. 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 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. ''Fram's'' drift and Nansen's sledge journey 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. 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. == Background == In September 1879 the ''Jeannette'', an ex-Royal Navy gunboat converted by the US Navy for Arctic exploration, and commanded by George Washington De Long, entered the pack ice north of the Bering Strait. She remained ice-bound for nearly two years, drifting to the area of the New Siberian Islands, before being crushed and sunk on 13 June 1881. Her crew escaped in boats and made for the Siberian coast; most, including De Long, subsequently perished in the wastelands of the Lena River delta. Three years later, relics from the ''Jeannette'' appeared on the opposite side of the world, in the vicinity of Julianehaab on the southwest coast of Greenland. These items, frozen into the drifting ice, included clothing bearing crew members' names and documents signed by De Long; they were indisputably genuine. In a lecture given in 1884 to the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters Dr. Henrik Mohn, one of the founders of modern meteorology, argued that the finding of the ''Jeannette'' 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. These theories were read with interest by the 23-year-old Fridtjof Nansen, then working as a curator at the Bergen Museum while completing his doctoral studies. Nansen was already captivated by the frozen north; two years earlier he had experienced a four-month voyage on the sealer ''Viking'', which had included three weeks trapped in drifting ice. An expert skier, Nansen was making plans to lead the first crossing of the Greenland icecap, an objective delayed by the demands of his academic studies, but triumphantly achieved in 1888–89. Through these years Nansen remembered the east–west Arctic drift theory and its inherent possibilities for further polar exploration, and shortly after his return from Greenland he was ready to announce his plans. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Nansen's Fram expedition」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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