Fridtjof Nansen became famous in the 1880s and '90s for his exploration of the Arctic, which he described in many books, often illustrated by himself. He played a key part in the successful dissolution of the union between Sweden and Norway in 1905, and served as Norway's first ambassador to the United Kingdom. Later he made major contributions to the foundation of the science of physical oceanography, and after World War I he worked extensively with the repatriation of prisoners of war and refugees, and with famine relief.

Early life and career
Nansen was born near Oslo. His father was a prosperous lawyer and a religious man with a clear conception of personal duty and moral principle; his mother was a strongminded, athletic woman who introduced her children to outdoor life and encouraged them to develop physical skills. And Nansen's athletic prowess was to prove of the utmost importance to his career. He became expert in skating, tumbling, and swimming, but it was his expertise in skiing that was to play such a large role in his life. Nansen was tall, supple, strong, hard. He possessed the physical endurance to ski fifty miles in a day and the psychological self-reliance to embark on long trips, with a minimum of gear and only his dog for company.

In 1882 Nansen shipped on the sealer Viking to the east coast of Greenland. On this trip of four and a half months, he made observations on seals and bears.

Obtaining the post of zoological curator at the Bergen Museum (in Bergen) later that year, Nansen spent the next six years in intensive scientific study. In 1888 he successfully defended his dissertation on the central nervous system of certain lower vertebrates for the doctorate at the University of Oslo.

For a long time Nansen had been evolving a plan to cross Greenland, whose interior had never been explored. He decided to cross from the uninhabited east to the inhabited west; in other words, once his party was put ashore, there could be no retreat. The party of six survived temperatures of -45° C, climbed to 9,000 feet above sea level, mastered dangerous ice, exhaustion, and privation to emerge on the west coast early in October of 1888 after a trip of about two months, bringing with them important information about the interior.

In 1893, Fridtjof Nansen sailed to the Arctic in the Fram. The ship was deliberately allowed to drift north through the sea ice. The journey took more than three years.

Nansen conjectured the Polar current's warm water "could hardly have been other than the Gulf Stream" and was the agent behind the movement of the ice. During this first crossing of the Arctic Ocean the expedition became the first to discover the existence of a deep polar basin.

After more than one year in the ice it became apparent that Fram would not reach the North Pole. Fridtjof Nansen continued north on foot when the Fram reached 84° 4´ N. The theory that the currents would carry the Fram over the north pole were proved incorrect. Nansen reasoned this was caused due to the Earth's rotation which resulted in polar drift. This was a daring decision, as it meant leaving the ship not to return, and a return journey over drifting ice to the nearest known land some five hundred miles south of the point where they started. Nansen and his companion Johansen started north on 14 March 1895 with 3 sledges, 3 kayaks and 28 dogs. On 8 April 1895, they reached 86° 14´ N, the highest latitude then attained. The two men then turned around and started back. Their watches stopped during a twelve hour trek, however, and they were thus unable to correctly reckon their position, and did not find the land they expected at 83°N (it actually did not exist).

In June 1895, Fridtjof Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen had to use their kayaks to cross open leads of water. On 24 July they came across a series of islands. Here they built a hut of moss, stones, and walrus hides, and wintered, surviving on walrus blubber and polar bear meat. In May of the following year (1896), they started off again for Spitsbergen. After travelling for a month, not knowing where they were, they happened upon the British Jackson-Harmsworth Expedition (led by Frederick George Jackson) whose party were wintering on the island. Jackson informed them that they were in fact on Franz Josef Land. Finally, Nansen and Johansen made it back to Vardø in the north of Norway.


Dead water
Fridtjof Nansen was the first to note and describe dead water. Dead water is the nautical term for a strange phenomenon which can occur when a layer of fresh  or brackish water rests on top of denser salt water, without the two layers mixing. A ship traveling in such conditions may be hard to maneuver or can even slow down almost to a standstill. The phenomenon is observable where glacier runoff flows into salt water without much mixing, such as in fjords.


Independence of Norway from Sweden
Nansen interrupted his research in 1905 to urge the independence of Norway from Sweden and, after the dissolution of the Union, served as his country's minister to Great Britain until May of 1908. In the next few years he led several oceanographic expeditions into polar regions, but once the world was plunged into war in 1914 and exploration was halted, he became increasingly interested in international political affairs.


Head of a Norwegian delegation in Washington, D. C.
For almost a year in 1917-1918, as the head of a Norwegian delegation in Washington, D. C., Nansen negotiated an agreement for a relaxation of the Allied blockade to permit shipments of essential food. In 1919, he became president of the Norwegian Union for the League of Nations and at the Peace Conference in Paris was an influential lobbyist for the adoption of the League Covenant and for recognition of the rights of small nations. From 1920 until his death he was a delegate to the League from Norway.


Work for the League of Nations and Red Cross
In the spring of 1920, the League of Nations asked Nansen to undertake the task of repatriating the prisoners of war, many of them held in Russia. Moving with his customary boldness and ingenuity, and despite restricted funds, Nansen repatriated 450,000 prisoners in the next year and a half.

The Red Cross in 1921 asked Nansen to take on the humanitarian task of directing relief for millions of Russians dying in the famine of 1921-1922. Help for Russia, then suspect in the eyes of most of the Western nations, was hard to muster, but Nansen pursued his task with awesome energy. In the end he gathered and distributed enough supplies to save a staggering number of people.

In 1922 at the request of the Greek government and with the approval of the League of Nations, Nansen tried to solve the problem of the Greek refugees who poured into their native land from their homes in Asia Minor after the Greek army had been defeated by the Turks. Nansen arranged an exchange of about 1,250,000 Greeks living on Turkish soil for about 500,000 Turks living in Greece, with appropriate indemnification and provisions for giving them the opportunity for a new start in life.

Nansen's fifth great humanitarian effort, at the invitation of the League in 1925, was to save the remnants of the Armenian people from extinction. He drew up a political, industrial, and financial plan for creating a national home for the Armenians in Erivan that foreshadowed what the United Nations Technical Assistance Board and the International Bank of Development and Reconstruction have done in the post-World War II period. The League failed to implement the plan, but the Nansen International Office for Refugees later settled some 10,000 in Erivan and 40,000 in Syria and Lebanon.

Nansen died on May 13, 1930, and was buried on May 17, Norway's Constitution Day.


Hurtigruten's explorer ship MS Fram
Hurtigruten's state-of-the-art explorer ship MS Fram, cruising Arctic and Antarctic waters, is named after Fridtjof Nansen's most famous polar ship. Nansens ship "Fram" was a purpose-built, round-hulled ship later used by Roald Amundsen to transport his expedition to Antarctica.

In Norway's capital Oslo you can see Nansen's ship in the Fram Museum. The Fram Museum shows the history of the polar explorers. Here you’ll find the world's most famous polar ship, the Fram, built in 1892. The ship is displayed in its original condition with interior and objects perfectly preserved.