Soren Walljasper, NGM Staff. Sources: Douglas Stenton, University of Waterloo; Jonathan Moore, Parks Canada; Matthew Betts, HMS Terror; Mark Synnott; Tom Gross

We rarely link to expeditions-gone-awry stories, but here is an exception, with thanks to National Geographic:

Seeking to solve the Arctic’s biggest mystery, they ended up trapped in ice at the top of the world

In 1847, Sir John Franklin and a crew of 128 men disappeared while searching for the fabled Northwest Passage. A National Geographic team sought to find evidence of their fate—but the Arctic doesn’t give up its secrets easily.

Jacob Keanik scanned his binoculars over the field of ice surrounding our sailboat. He was looking for the polar bear that had been stalking us for the past 24 hours, but all he could see was an undulating carpet of blue-green pack ice that stretched to the horizon. “Winter is coming,” he murmured. Jacob had never seen Game of Thrones and was unaware of the phrase’s reference to the show’s menacing hordes of ice zombies, but to us, the threat posed by this frozen horde was equally dire. Here in remote Pasley Bay, deep in the Canadian Arctic, winter would bring a relentless tide of boat-crushing ice. If we didn’t find a way out soon, it could trap us and destroy our vessel—and perhaps us too.

It was late August, and we’d ducked into the bay to ride out a ferocious gale. For more than a week, the wind had raged, sweeping six-foot-thick chunks of frozen seawater down from the polar cap. Some were the size of picnic tables, others as big as river barges.

Here and there, small icebergs jutted skyward like miniature floating Alps. The pieces of this drifting mosaic bobbed around the boat, rasping as they ground against each other and fizzing as they slowly melted and released trapped air bubbles.

Any one of these floes could be the torpedo that pierced our fiberglass hull, so we’d traded watches around the clock, constantly steering the ice away from the boat with long wooden poles the Inuit call tuks. As one day became two, and two became three, the ice slowly closed in like a vise. On day nine, when Jacob and I awoke to find the water between the floes had frozen, it seemed certain we were going to be trapped here for the winter. A cold knot formed in my gut as I wondered if this was how Franklin felt…

Read the whole story here.