Post from a Scientist: “10 Things You Didn’t Know About Nansen”

Fridtjof Nansen was a humanitarian and an oceanographer. He was a polar explorer who crossed Greenland on skis and made it almost all the way to the North Pole on his ship Fram (Norwegian for “forward”) in the late nineteenth century. We can only try to follow in his explorer’s footsteps! Here are 10 more facts you didn’t know.

 1.    He was 7 when a fishing hook got stuck in his lip and his mother cut the lip with a razor to get it out. And they both were absolutely calm the whole time.

2.    He won the National Cross-country skiing Championship of Norway 12 times, and at 19 he beat the world record in 1-mile ice-skating.

3.    He earned a PhD in Biology. The story goes that people didn’t fully understand his results, but he was awarded the PhD anyway because people did not expect him to survive his upcoming Greenland expedition.

4.    The preparations for the Fram expedition took him 3 years. He refused to leave until he was absolutely ready, had best equipment possible, and went through all possible scenarios in his head.

5.    His sketches, made with pastel and water-colors, are so full of life that you feel as if you are in the middle of Arctic yourself when looking at them.

6.    He was a great writer. His diary notes are like R.L. Stevenson and Jules Verne combined (plus, his books are now 100 years old so they are copyright-free).

7.    For the winter of 1895-96 that he spent in Franz-Josef Land, he ate bouillon with meat for breakfast and fried steaks for dinner.

8.    He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922. “Nansen’s Passport,” which he invented for prisoners of war and refugees, is still in use and acknowledged by 52 countries.

9.    He was really disappointed he couldn’t do a lot more scientific research after the Fram expedition, but he made sure to give away his ideas to other scientists to work on.

10.   The last paper he published was about skiing techniques.

 – Alena Malyarenko