Franklin’s Ill-Fated Expedition Contradicts Dr. Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick Temperature Reconstruction
By P Gosselin on 12. March 2022
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The Franklin Expedition’s greatest enemy: The Little Ice Age
By Die kalte Sonne
(Translation/editing by P. Gosselin)
The topic of “exploring the Earth’s polar regions” is topical again now. This is not only shown by spectacular expeditions such as the MOSAIC Expedition 2019, but also researchers recently discovered the Endurance, the ship of South Pole explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton. The Endurance had sunk in the Antarctic Weddell Sea in 1915. The explorer and his crew managed to save themselves at the time.
Some daring explorers like him have brought science considerable gains in knowledge. Their achievement cannot be appreciated enough. (Epic survival story).
Lead poisoning
Unfortunately, the participants of the Franklin Expedition in 1845 fared quite differently. None survived the search for the Northwest Passage, and only later did the mystery of the expedition’s failure unravel. One reason for this tragic end was probably due to lead. In the mid-19th century, food tins were soldered shut with lead. Sir John Franklin took plenty of provisions with him, but some of them had been carried in cans. So members of the expedition regularly ate lead as well. The few documents that were deposited in metal tubes in prominent specially erected landscape points (e.g., stone pyramids) at that time indicate that the lead had affected the thinking of the crew. They sometimes jotted down confused things on the forms. Nor is it possible to explain the behavior of parts of the crew who apparently returned to the ships that had already been abandoned. Possibly the lead had an influence here.
Extreme cold, cannibalism
Much worse, however, was the climate in the mid-19th century, when the explorer set out to find the sea route from Europe to Asia via America. Franklin, of course, had planned to winter in the Arctic and then find the route to the Pacific during the short Arctic summer. However, the ice did not melt as expected but, contrary to the hopes of the Arctic explorers, actually grew during the summer. As a result, the ships did not make any progress even in the summer; on the contrary, they drifted with the ice in a southerly direction, i.e. opposite to their actual destination.
In 1845, very cool temperatures were noted for the British summer. It was about 2 degrees cooler than usual according to these records. The winters of 1846 and 1847 were thus even colder in England. The summer of 1845 must also have been very wet. It was the year that potato blight destroyed the crops in Ireland, causing famine. The end of Franklin’s expedition was dramatic because there is much to suggest that even cannibalism was practiced in the face of adversity.
https://notrickszone.com/2022/03/12/franklins-ill-fated-expedition-contradicts-dr-michael-manns-hockey-stick-temperature-reconstruction/
