History of Polar Exploration

Sea Ice: Exploration History

Sea ice played a pivotal role in several expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic. The polar regions are among the least accessible on Earth and were some of the last areas that human beings reached. Antarctica was not even discovered until 1820, and no one set foot on that continent until 1895. Explorers arrived at the North Pole in 1909. Part of the reason these achievements took so long was that sea ice blocked the path of anyone wishing to reach the poles.

Exploration: Arctic

The Viking Era (793 to 1066) to 1500s

Sea ice was a key factor in the development of the Viking immigration into Greenland and the ultimate demise of their settlements. The Vikings sailed from Iceland and first settled in Greenland in 981. They developed pasture land and farms on the western Greenland coast. However, in the harsh environment, they were not self-sufficient and required supplies, which were transported from Norway and Iceland across the sea. This was a relatively warm period of history, and sea ice was uncommon in the trade route between Greenland and Europe. By the 1300s, the climate had turned much colder.

Trade decreased with Norway, partly because of political and economic factors in Norway, but also because of the increasing sea ice, which made transoceanic travel more costly and dangerous. After the early 1400s, contact was completely lost with the Greenland Vikings. When the next European ship sailed into the region almost 150 years later, the sailors encountered no surviving settlers. While the colder temperatures affected the Vikings primarily through lower crop yields and a stressed food supply, increased sea ice likely had some effect by cutting off the delivery of necessary supplies from mainland Europe.

1500s to 1900s

Sea ice has played an important, and often tragic, role in the exploration of the polar regions since the 1500s. Initially, Europeans were interested in finding the “Northwest Passage,” a hypothetical sea route through the Arctic from Europe to Asia. The Europeans thought that if they found such a route, it would lead to a much faster voyage because the distance was so short between Europe and the Arctic. But the arctic sea ice stymied many attempts from the 1500s through the 1800s.

It wasn’t until 1906 that the Northwest Passage was finally successfully navigated by Roald Amundsen, a famous Norwegian polar explorer who also led the first expedition to the South Pole. Navigation through the Northwest Passage was a difficult voyage and took Amundsen and his crew three years to complete.

Sea ice was also an important factor in attempts to reach the North Pole, which is situated in the middle of the Arctic Ocean and is covered by sea ice the entire year. Initially, some explorers believed that enough open water existed for a ship to navigate to the North Pole. This led to the ill-fated Jeannette expedition, led by the U.S. Navy in 1879.

The Navy believed that warm ocean currents flowed from the Pacific Ocean into the Arctic through the Bering Strait between Alaska and Russia, maintaining ice-free waters all the way to the North Pole. However, this was not the case, and the Jeannette quickly became stuck in the sea ice shortly after passing through the Bering Strait. It drifted with the ice for two years, but in 1881, the ship was crushed by the shifting sea ice, and the crew was forced to abandon it and try to reach land over the ice. During summer, the ice broke apart before the crew reached the Russian shore, and they jumped into three small life boats they had dragged with them. One boat was lost in a storm. Of the other two, one landed near a village, and those crewmembers survived. The other unfortunate life boat landed in an isolated region, and those members did not survive, likely due to starvation.

Fritjof Nansen, a Norwegian, took note of the Jeannette tragedy. He realized that a ship couldn’t sail to the North Pole but might reach it by drifting with the ice; however, the ship would have to be built to withstand the crushing force of the sea ice. The answer to Nansen’s quest was the Fram.

The Fram

The Fram was built and launched in 1892. Its strong hull was specifically designed so that the force of the ice would push the hull upward, leaving the ship to sit on top of the ice. From 1893 to 1896, the Fram drifted across the Arctic, trapped in the sea ice. This experience confirmed that sea ice has a large-scale (hundreds of kilometers) circulation and moves across the entire Arctic. Ultimately, the drifting sea ice failed to take the Fram over the North Pole, reaching only 85 degrees, 14 minutes latitude.

On March 14th, 1895, Nansen and a companion left the ship with dogs, kayaks and sledges, making a desperate bid for the Pole. Their progress was pitifully slow, and the conditions were worse than expected. Finally, at 86 degrees 14 minutes north, the closest to the Pole any man had come, they decided to turn back.

Despite its failure to achieve its ultimate goal, the Fram expedition reached farther north than any other ship before, and farther than any other surface ship to date except for Russian nuclear-powered icebreakers.

Robert Peary 1900s

Americans Robert Peary and Matthew Henson, along with several Inuits, were the first people to finally reach the North Pole. They arrived on April 6, 1909, by traversing across the sea ice on dog sleds. But were they really the first?

Another American, Dr. Frederick Cook, claimed his expedition reached the North Pole on April 28, 1908. The Peary and Cook groups both had conflicting details in their stories, and neither group could provide definitive proof that they were first. Sea ice is one reason for the conflicting stories.

No flag or other marker placed at the North Pole can stay for long. Drifting sea ice will move any marker away, and shifting ice would eventually destroy the marker. Most historians now believe that Cook’s claim is false, because a map of Cook’s route showed that instead of going to the North Pole, Cook had gone only a short distance to the northwest on the Arctic Ocean before turning back. But because of the missing marker, we will never know with complete certainty who reached the North Pole first, or if neither of them did. 

Exploration: Antarctica

Cook’s Error

In the mid 1700’s, rumors of a large continent at the South Pole circulated, but because explorers had not yet encountered it, Antarctica’s existence was doubted by many. James Cook was an English explorer who led several early expeditions aimed at exploring the landmasses in the far South. In 1772, Cook led an expedition composed of two ships; Cook commanded the HMS Resolution, and Tobias Furneaux commanded the HMS Adventure. This expedition was the first to circumnavigate the Earth at such a high Southern latitude. They reached as far south as 71 degrees, 10 minutes latitude. However, due to extensive sea ice, the expedition was unable to reach Antarctica despite several attempts to travel farther south. Upon returning home in 1775, Cook reported that the myth of a continent at the South Pole was nothing more than just that: a myth.

Bellinghausen’s Discovery

Inspired by Cook’s southern expeditions, Russian explorer Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen led voyages to further explore the southern oceans and land masses. In 1819, Bellingshausen led a two-ship expedition that was the first since Cook to pass into the Antarctic Circle. Because Bellingshausen’s expedition made their southern attempts during the Antarctic summer (November to February), sea ice extent was reduced. On January 28, 1820, the expedition discovered the Antarctic mainland, and Bellingshausen became one of the first people to see the fabled continent. Unfortunately, because of sea ice, the ships were only able to get within 20 miles of Antarctica, and so this expedition could not claim the first landing on Antarctica. Nonetheless, they had finally proven that a continent does in fact exist at the South Pole.

The Shackleton Story

Endurance trapped in ice. Photo by Macklin

Sea ice played a key role in the British expedition of 1914 to Antarctica, led by Ernest Shackleton. The goal of the Shackleton expedition was to cross the entire Antarctic continent from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea.

Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance, sailed into the Weddell Sea in 1914 with a crew of 28 men, several dogs, and one cat–-Mrs. Chippy (who was actually a male). They encountered more sea ice than expected, and the Endurance became trapped in the ice on January 18, 1915.

For several months, the ship drifted with the ice until it was finally crushed by the ice, like the Jeannette had been in the Arctic. The crew abandoned the ship on October 27, 1915, and began walking across the ice, pulling three lifeboats along. They kept the dogs to help pull the lifeboats, but Mrs. Chippy had to be killed after they abandoned the ship because the crew could take with them only what was absolutely necessary. The cat’s amazing story is told in Mrs. Chippy’s Last Expedition: The Remarkable Journal of Shackleton’s Polar-Bound Cat, by Caroline Alexander.

The crew found that crossing the ice was impossible, even with the help of their dogs. The ice was full of ridges (piles of ice) that they had to climb over, and the wet snow was sticky, making it even more difficult to drag the lifeboats. After a couple of attempts to cross the ice, the crew built a small camp on the ice and waited for the drift of the ice to carry them northward. They killed the dogs because their food supply was limited, and they could not spare extra for the dogs. Additionally, the dogs themselves provided extra meat for the crew, who did not know how long they would be stranded at their camp.

On April 9, 1916, after 164 days of drifting on the ice, the ice floe they were camped on finally reached the ice edge and began to break up. They boarded their three small lifeboats and sailed through rough seas, with little food or water, for seven days. Eventually, they reached the small, uninhabited Elephant Island near the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. For the first time in 497 days, the men stood on real ground. However, the island was small, unsheltered, and far from any sailing routes. The chance of being rescued by a passing ship was minimal. No one knew where they were, or even that they were in trouble.

Shackleton decided that the only hope of saving his crew was for a small group to attempt to sail to South Georgia Island, which had a whaling station and a ship that could come back and rescue the rest of the crew on Elephant Island. South Georgia Island is 1,287 kilometers (800 miles) to the east of Elephant Island, across some of the roughest seas in the world. Shackleton hoped to do it with rudimentary navigational equipment in the James Caird; at 6.7 meters (22 feet), it was the largest of the lifeboats. After 14 days of sailing, the crew ran out of fresh water. Fortunately, on the verge of dehydration, they reached South Georgia Island two days later. After a 36-hour hike across a steep and snowy mountain range, they reached the whaling station on May 20, 1916; this was their first encounter with civilization in 531 days.

Shackleton could not rest long at the whaling station. He needed to return to Elephant Island and save the rest of his crew. Even though he left immediately, it took three attempts and more than three months to rescue the crew because sea ice prevented the ships from reaching the island. Finally, on August 30, 1916, the rescue ship made it to Elephant Island. Amazingly, after 143 days on Elephant Island, 307 days since abandoning the Endurance, and almost two years after the beginning of the expedition, not a single person in the expedition perished.

A little-known part of this story involves the Aurora, which sailed to the other side of the Antarctic continent to haul supplies for Shackleton’s planned trek across the continent. The Aurora crew also encountered harsh conditions, and three crew members were killed when they left the ship. They unwisely ventured onto unstable sea ice. A blizzard appeared, and they were never heard from again.