How did wreckage from the Jeannette influence Fridtjof Nansen’s Arctic plan?

The discovery of wreckage from the Jeannette on the southwest coast of Greenland provided critical evidence that items could drift across the Arctic Ocean from the Siberian side.12

This finding inspired Fridtjof Nansen to develop a daring plan: rather than fighting the ice, he would intentionally allow a ship to be trapped in the pack ice to be carried by the same trans-Arctic current. To execute this, he commissioned the Fram, a vessel specifically engineered to withstand lateral ice pressure by rising above the surface rather than being crushed. Nansen’s successful three-year drift confirmed the existence of this current and allowed for extensive scientific exploration of the region.1