The expedition was known as the Polarfahrt – “polar voyage” in German. 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. But there was a mystery afoot in the region.