POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY
SUMNER N. BLOSSOM, Editor
December, 1923


The giant new navy dirigible ZR-1 in test flight. If she makes the voyage across the North Pole next summer, it will prove according to Vilhjalmut Stefansson. Famous arctic explorer, "one of the turning points in history".

Will the ZR-1 Discover a Polar Paradise?

Here is one of the most outstanding stories of scientific possibility ever published. Commander Green's exclusive article has all the pungency of romantic fiction; at the same time it is founded on scientific observations of a veteran arctic explorer, and corroborated by fascinating legends of the Eskimos. Not since the days of Columbus has any venture held such power of gripping the world's imagination as the proposed voyage of the ZR-1.

In the issue of POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY for November, 1920, the prophesy was made that a "huge dirigible of the Zeppelin type will enable the explorer of the future to study the geography of the poles in a really scientific way." Now this promise is to be fulfilled in the projected transpolar flight of the new navy dirigible next summer. What will be the outcome?

Commander Green's entrancing picture of a balmy polar paradise represents, he says, simply a tremendous possibility of arctic aeronautic exploration. In this article he sets forth the facts as he has gathered them. Whether you agree with this theory or not, you will find it absorbingly fascinating.

By Lieutenant-Commander Fitzhugh Green, U.S.N.

    In the proposed transpolar flight of the huge new navy
dirigible, the ZR-1 (the Shenandoah), next summer, lies the
most thrilling possibility that ever faced a single body of explorers;
    In the center of the unknown area of the Polar Sea may be discovered
a vast continent heated by subterranean fires, and inhabited by the descen-
dants of the last Norwegian colony of Greenland!

    So wild is the idea as to tax the most gullible imagination. Yet it is
vividly encouraged and supported not only by history and tradition,
but by the searching test of scientific analysis.
    Witness the astounding facts:
    Within the boundaries of the Polar Sea spreads the greatest unexplored
area on the surface of the globe: 1,000,000 square miles on which no human
eye has gazed! Look at the map on page 31. Most of this enormous wilder-
ness lies on the Alaskan side of the Pole. On the European side lies Iceland
at a point corresponding roughly to the center of the unknown area oppo-
site it across the top of the world. This fact is significant. Experts are in
nearly unanimous agreement that a new arctic land will be found by the
ZR-1. Doctor Harris, the tidal expert in Washington, D. C., long ago
declared that the data he had worked out from polar ocean currents all
convinced him that the existence of a large land-mass near the North Pole
is indisputable.

Next Page



Will the ancestors of the Lost Colony of Vikings who mysteriously vanished from Greenland centuries ago be found inhabiting a steam heated polar continent? Eskimo tradition paints in vivid terms the White Men swarming suddenly northwards to a wonderland the natives long had known - a land of endless summer, rich in vegetation and game.