Wikipedia:Today's featured article/July 8, 2016
The Jeannette Expedition of 1879–81 was an attempt led by George W. De Long to reach the North Pole using a route through the Bering Strait to the fabled temperate Open Polar Sea. The expedition was financed by James Gordon Bennett Jr., the proprietor of the New York Herald, and based on the ocean current theories of the German cartographer August Petermann. The attempt failed; the expedition's ship, USS Jeannette (pictured), drifted in the polar ice for nearly two years before being crushed and sunk, north of the Siberian coast. De Long then led his men on a journey by boat and sled to the Lena Delta. Before ultimate rescue, more than half of the ship's complement died, including De Long. During Jeannette's long drift the expedition discovered what were later called the De Long Islands, and collected significant meteorological and oceanographic data. Although the ship's fate demolished the long-standing Open Polar Sea theory, the appearance in 1884 of debris from the wreck on the south-west coast of Greenland indicated that an Arctic current carried the ice from east to west. This discovery inspired Fridtjof Nansen to mount his Fram expedition nine years later. (Full article...)