Airships were a potentially liberating project for Fridtjof Nansen. At the same time, they combined the fields of endeavour in which he had been active throughout his life to date. They appealed to the adventurer in him as well as to the humanist and scientist.

For the first time, this book tells the tale of Fridtjof Nansen and Aeroarctic. In this pioneering work, Lars Frode Larsen gets to grips with Nansen’s commitment to leading a scientific expedition to the Polar region with airships – a journey that never came to fruition. It is a dramatic story, a tale rife with complications and tensions at the personal, scientific, financial and political level.