![]() A revolutionary way to measure the atmosphere The expedition would also discover six islands and redraw the coastal outlines of many others. "Heaven knows whether the explorer who put these islands on the map (I believe it was Payer) had been a victim of a mirage, mistaking some icebergs for land … At any rate, as of July 27, 1931, they have been officially erased.” Where it ought to have been, there was nothing but the black polar sea and the reflection of the white Zeppelin. Funny as it sounds Harmsworth Land didn’t exist either. It could be found on every map of the Arctic, but not in the Arctic itself … But that was easier said than done, for Albert Edward Land had the disadvantage of not existing. “Our first objective was an island called Albert Edward Land. “We spent the remainder of making a geographical survey of Franz Josef Land,” Koestler wrote. The airborne expedition they devised would employ pioneering technologies and make important geographical, meteorological and magnetic discoveries in the Arctic – including remapping much of the Barents Sea. This ran into practical difficulties and Hearst abandoned the plan, but the notion of using the Graf Zeppelin to conduct geographic and scientific investigations of the high Arctic was taken up by an international polar science committee. ![]() Hearst proposed having the Graf Zeppelin, then the world’s largest airship, fly to the North Pole for a meeting with a submarine that would travel under the ice. The 1931 expedition emerged from American newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst’s plan for a spectacular publicity stunt. Nearly a century ago, an innovative airborne expedition redrew the maps of large swaths of the Barents Sea. This was not the first such disappearing act in the high Arctic, or the first need to erase land from the map. They likely came from a nearby glacier, where other newly calved icebergs, covered with gravel from landslides, were ready to float off. They announced their findings in September 2022: These elusive islands are actually large icebergs grounded at the sea bottom. Some scientists theorized that these were rocky banks that had been pushed up by sea ice.īut when a team of Swiss and Danish surveyors traveled north to investigate this “ghost islands” phenomenon, they discovered something else entirely. ![]() ![]() Just north of Cape Morris Jesup, several other small islands had been discovered over the decades, and then disappeared. The discoverers named it Qeqertaq Avannarleq – Greenlandic for “the northern most island.”īut there was a mystery afoot in the region. It was small and gravelly, and it was declared a contender for the title of the most northerly known land mass in the world. In 2021, an expedition off the icy northern Greenland coast spotted what appeared to be a previously uncharted island. ![]()
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