A Brief History of North Pole Exploration

The Ancient Greeks believed there was a continental landmass surrounding the North Pole. It was not until the late 1900s that this was disproved.

The quest to conquer the North Pole began in June 1827, when William Parry, an accomplished officer of the British Royal Navy, set out from Spitsbergen with two teams of 14 men, provisions for 71 days, and specially constructed boats that doubled as sledges. Hauling them across the frozen horizon, Parry and his men struggled through the ice. Because it was summer, the ice was moving south at a faster rate than they were able to proceed northward. They gave up on their goal two months later, after having traveled 172 miles north to latitude 82°75' North, a record that would stand for decades to come.

The next major Arctic figure, Fridtjof Nansen, was a six-foot, blonde, blue-eyed Norseman of magnificent physique, who had steely will-power and organizing ability. His idea was to build a small, strong ship able to withstand the crushing pressures of the ice pack and drift with the Polar current rather than fight against it. Named Fram ("forward" in Norwegian), the sturdy vessel lived up to its expectations.

As their drift mission approached the Pole, Nansen realized Fram would not pass through it. So he and Hjalmar Johansen left the ship in March 1895 and dog-sledged to a new farthest north of 86°22' North on April 8th. They turned back after realizing the moving ice pack was taking them away from the Pole at a rate faster than they could move over it. Nonetheless, Nansen had made it within 200 miles of the North Pole and had proved there was no landmass at the top of our planet.

Their return trip was fraught with dangers. Having spent the winter in an improvised hut on Franz Josef Land they stumbled upon the English explorer Jackson, whose relief ship transported them back to Norway. There they joined their returning shipmates from Fram which had successfully completed its drift mission across the Arctic Ocean from western Siberia.

It was not until the early 20 th Century that explorers finally reached the North Pole, and even this remains uncertain. In 1909 Robert Peary announced that he and his party had reached the Pole on April 6th. They had covered 413 miles, remained there for 30 hours, and raced back to their starting point. After three attempts over several years, this was the final fulfillment of Peary's lifelong dream. However, his claim was met with much controversy focused on the accuracy of his navigation.

To complicate matters, Dr. Frederick Cook claimed to have reached the Pole a year earlier. However, in the telling of Cook's story several navigational discrepancies were apparent and scientists of the time accepted Peary's claim over Cook's. In recent years, reinvestigation of Peary's expedition has led many to conclude that he got close but did not reach the Pole.

Another polar controversy still swirls over the claim by Commander Richard Byrd that he and co-pilot Floyd Bennett overflew the Pole on May 9, 1926. According to their reports, they took off from Spitsbergen in a Fokker trimotor, reached the Pole and returned the same day. Critics in recent years have questioned the limits of the plane's performance. Three days after Byrd's flight a dirigible airship Norge passed over the Pole on a 70-hour flight from Spitsbergen to Alaska . The expedition was led by Roald Amundsen and Lincoln Ellsworth, and was piloted by Norge's Italian designer, Umberto Nobile.

The next major exploration of the Pole was underwater in 1958 when the US Navy's Nautilus, the world's first nuclear submarine, passed under the North Pole. It had crossed the Arctic Ocean submerged from Alaska to Greenland in an historic four-day trek under the August ice. Subsequently nuclear submarines from the US , British and Soviet navies have made hundreds of trips under the Arctic Ocean, many surfacing at the North Pole.

In April 1969 Sir Wally Herbert led a four-man dogsled expedition from Point Barrow , Alaska and continued across the Arctic Sea to Norway . He covered more territory than any other surface crossing to the Pole. It took him 14 months and 2,000 kilometers in an admirable feat of exploration, and many polar experts believe that this was probably the first overland expedition to reach the North Pole.

It was 1977 when the Soviet Union 's Arktika, a nuclear-powered icebreaker, became the first surface ship to navigate the Arctic ice to the North Pole.

The final great exploration at the North Pole will be a submersible expedition to the real North Pole, 14,400 feet deep below the ice.

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