Fridtjof Nansen

Fridtjof Nansen was a zoologist by training, working on the nervous systems of sea creatures at the Bergen museum, when he decided in 1888 to cross Greenland on skis. Almost everyone told him it was foolish. He landed on the uninhabited east coast so there could be no turning back, and six weeks later his small party walked into the settlement on the west coast. They had to winter there before a ship could take them home.

His next idea was stranger. Wreckage from a ship crushed off Siberia had turned up near Greenland, so he reasoned that a current ran across the Arctic Ocean. He had the Fram built with a rounded hull that ice would push upward rather than crush, and in 1893 sailed it deliberately into the pack. After eighteen months of drifting he and Hjalmar Johansen left the ship and struck out for the Pole on foot.

They reached 86 degrees 14 minutes north, further than anyone before, then turned back with the ice moving against them. They spent a whole winter in a stone and walrus-hide hut on Franz Josef Land, living on bear and walrus, and stumbled into a British expedition the following summer by pure chance.

Nansen never went back to the ice. He became a professor, then a diplomat, and after the First World War organised the return of hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war and invented a travel document for stateless people. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922.