The Jeannette Expedition of 1879–81 was an attempt led by George W. De Long to reach the North Pole using a route through the Bering Strait to the fabled temperate Open Polar Sea. The expedition was financed by James Gordon Bennett, Jr., the proprietor of the New York Herald, and based on the ocean current theories of the German cartographer August Petermann. The attempt failed; the expedition's ship, USS Jeannette(pictured), drifted in the polar ice for nearly two years before being crushed and sunk, north of the Siberian coast. De Long then led his men on a journey by boat and sled to the Lena Delta. Before ultimate rescue, more than half of the ship's complement died, including De Long. During Jeannette's long drift the expedition discovered what were later called the De Long Islands, and collected significant meteorological and oceanographic data. Although the ship's fate demolished the long-standing Open Polar Sea theory, the appearance in 1884 of debris from the wreck on the south-west coast of Greenland indicated that an Arctic current carried the ice from east to west. This discovery inspired Fridtjof Nansen to mount his Fram expedition nine years later. (Full article...)
The Chilcot Report into British participation in the Iraq War finds that peaceful alternatives were not exhausted, that intelligence was flawed, and that there was insufficient planning for its aftermath.
The Juno spacecraft(pictured) achieves orbit around Jupiter for the start of a 20-month survey of the planet.
The 2012 Tour de France was contested by 22 teams. The 2012 Tour de France was the 99th edition of the race, one of cycling's Grand Tours. It started in the Belgian city of Liège on 30 June and finished on the Champs-Élysées in Paris on 22 July. The number of riders allowed per squad was nine, resulting in a start list total of 198 riders. From the riders that began the race, 153 crossed the finish line in Paris. The average rider age was 30.17, with 22-year-old Thibaut Pinot (FDJ–BigMat) as the youngest rider, and 40-year-old Jens Voigt (RadioShack–Nissan) the oldest. The riders came from 31 countries; France, Spain, Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, Germany and Australia all had 12 or more riders in the race. Fabian Cancellara (RadioShack–Nissan) won the prologue and held the general classification leader's yellow jersey for the first week. Team Sky's Bradley Wiggins(pictured), second in the prologue, took the leadership of the race on stage seven, the first mountainous stage. He maintained his lead for the remainder of the race, winning the two longest time trials, and not losing time to his main challengers for the overall title in the mountains. (Full list...)
The American Polyconic projection is a map projection conceptualized as "rolling" a separate cone tangent to the Earth at each parallel of latitude, rather than a single cone as in a normal conic projection. Each parallel is a circular arc of true scale. The scale is also true on the central meridian of the projection. This projection was in common use by many map-making agencies of the United States from the time of its proposal by Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler in 1825 until the mid-20th century.
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