Quote:
Originally Posted by MMM
Really? Interesting that the first passage of Northwest Passage wasn't until 1906 after many tried and failed, or even worse, died (like Sir John Franklin).
The first to make it through the ice was Roald Amundsen in his ship "Gjoa."
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Yes, mistake on my part, Amundsen was the first in 1906, but the passage has been open before.
In a letter from the President of the Royal Society
to the British Admiralty reports;
"It will without doubt have come to your Lordship's
knowledge that a considerable change of climate
inexplicable at present to us must have taken place
in the Circumpolar Regions, by which the severity
of the cold that has for centuries past enclosed
the seas in the high northern latitudes in an
impenetrable barrier of ice has been during the
last two years greatly abated… This, with
information of a similar nature derived from other
sources; the unusual abundance of ice islands that
have during the last two summers been brought by
currents from Davies Straights into the Atlantic."
The report sounds like something written in the year 2000, but it was actually written in 1817.