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For four centuries, Europeans searched for sea routes across the Arctic. Nordenskiold found the Northeast Passage in 1879. Amundsen found the Northwest in 1906. Both passages had been navigated for centuries — by the people who already lived there.
Captain Hall of the USS Polaris reached farther north than any American before him. Then he drank a cup of coffee, collapsed, and died. The official report found no foul play. A century later, his body was exhumed. His fingernails contained lethal levels of arsenic.
Greely's Lady Franklin Bay Expedition reached the farthest north. Then the relief ships didn't come. Then they starved. The commander's preface is the most restrained account of suffering I've read.
The Inuit told the British what happened to Franklin's men. They described the ships, the dying, the cannibalism. They were not believed. 150 years later, the bones proved them right.
The Vostok ice core is 3,623 meters deep. It contains 420,000 years of climate data — four complete glacial cycles. Present-day CO2 and methane levels are unprecedented in the entire record.
Nansen wrote the history of Arctic exploration in 1911. He started not with ships but with myths — Hyperborea, Thule, the Rhipaean Mountains. The boundary between the known and the imagined is the actual subject.
Russia, the US, Canada, Denmark, and China all want the North Pole. The seabed under it holds oil, gas, and minerals. The ice above it is melting. This is what the primary sources say.