A closer look
In 1937, the USSR decided the best way to flex its scientific muscle was to drop four guys and a dog onto a giant slab of drifting ice and see what happened. The North Pole-1 expedition was a grueling survival marathon masquerading as a weather observation post. As they floated 1,700 miles toward Greenland, their ice floe cracked beneath their tents, polar bears stalked their equipment, and temperatures plummeted to deadly extremes. They were finally rescued by icebreakers right before their floating home disintegrated entirely, returning to Moscow as national heroes of science and stubbornness.
