![]() So somehow Nansen found some men to go along, and with five years worth of supplies they rolled around to the Russian side and waited for the ice to come and take them to the North Pole. It's then you suddenly realize that this thing is a wooden fortress, built on the basis that when the ice squeezed, it would just rise up and sit on the surface, carried by the current to the North Pole. From the inside, you walk up to the bow and it's just criss-crossed buttresses of enormous pieces of wood. She's made entirely out of solid oak that is 1.4 meters thick at the front. She's got this kind of rounded, bulbous shape, and her rudder can be pulled in so that she can become a complete bowl. The Fram is quite an astonishing ship, you can go and see her in a little museum in Oslo, Norway. She's basically a wooden fruit bowl, and she's called the Fram. If you hold a seed between your fingers and squeeze, it kind of pops upwards, so they designed this wooden ship specifically for this expedition. Fridtjof Nansen, a Norwegian skier, adventurer and scientist, said "look, if there's this current, then maybe the way to get to the North Pole is to work with it, rather than against it."Īlong with Scottish shipbuilder Colin Archer, he built a ship where the solution to the problem of being squeezed by the ice was that the ship wouldn't resist the ice at all, it would just pop upwards.
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