Icebound: The climate-change secrets of 19th century ship's logs

One of the ships tracked by Old Weather is the Jeannette, whose epic story is one of bravery and doom. This engraving shows the Jeannette sinking in June 1881 after nearly two years trapped in the ice.
"On November 14, 1881, an American called George Melville limped across a frozen delta in Siberia and pulled a pole from the snow with his frost-bitten hands. Exhausted and half-starving, Melville was scouring the wasteland for fellow survivors of the most famous ship in the world. The USS Jeannette had set sail from San Francisco to conquer the North Pole. Instead, it quickly got trapped in ice and spent nearly two years drifting across the Arctic Ocean, lost to the rest of humanity. When it was finally crushed by the ice, the Jeannette’s 33 crew members set out across the frozen sea. A storm separated them, and Melville mustered a team of locals in the desolate Lena Delta to find his missing shipmates. He braved the wilderness as the days grew shorter, his legs so swollen and blistered from exposure that he vomited with the pain. First he found the pole. ..."
Reuters