Fridtjof Nansen, born October 10, 1861, in Norway, had an idea that other scientists called crazy. He believed that ocean currents under the Arctic ice could carry a ship from one side of the Arctic to the other. To prove it, he built a ship called the Fram ("Forward" in Norwegian) with a hull shaped like a bowl. When ice squeezed the Fram, the bowl shape popped the ship upward instead of crushing it. In 1893, Nansen deliberately sailed the Fram into the pack ice north of Siberia and let it freeze in place. For three years, the ice slowly carried the ship across the Arctic Ocean. During the drift, Nansen and one companion left the ship on skis and dog sleds, trying to reach the North Pole. They got closer than any human before them, reaching 86 degrees north latitude, but had to turn back. They survived a winter in a stone hut on an Arctic island, eating walrus and polar bear meat. The Fram eventually emerged from the ice near Svalbard, exactly as Nansen had predicted. His expedition proved that the Arctic Ocean had a current system that moved from east to west, a discovery that changed how scientists understood polar geography.