Nansen's History
Fridtjof Nansen was a Norwegian explorer who at age 27 led a team of five to be the first to cross the Greenland ice cap. Returning to Norway in 1889, he took a position at Christiana University as a professor of zoology, but his interests were not settled. He returned to exploration, leading the Fram expedition from 1893-96, crossing the then-uncharted Arctic Ocean. Although he wanted to continue exploring, his fame led him to be made Norway's ambassador to Britain. He helped dissolve the union of Norway and Sweden in 1905 and later organized a relief effort for refugees and POWs from World War I, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922.

After returning from the crossing of Greenland, Nansen had settled down into a house in Oslo, which he named Gothaab, to write about his recent experiences. On his wall, he hung the harpoon he used to hunt with in Greenland. Something about that harpoon always bothered him: Where did the wood come from that Greenlanders collected to make their tools? Despite the name, Greenland was mostly covered in ice with only seasonal vegetation that grew around the coasts. There were no trees there more than a couple of feet tall. Any wood there that had not been imported was driftwood. Nansen's harpoon was made from a piece of straight-grained, reddish wood that had washed up on the shore, originally from a tree that had grown tall and straight on some other land. It could have come from anywhere that connected to the arctic seas; the tree might have fallen into a stream or river and flowed down into the sea to drift by a current and land finally on the shores of Greenland.

An early indication of the origin of materials across the frozen polar sea came from the Jeanette, an American scientific ship that was trapped in the arctic ice north of Siberia in 1881. Despite all efforts to free her from the ice, she was crushed. Years later, a number of articles from the ship were found on the southwest coast of Greenland, evidence that there was a polar drift that might pass right through or very near the North Pole, from Siberia to Greenland.