What Happened to Roald Amundsen?

When he oversaw the first voyage to the South Pole in 1911, the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen established his legacy. But that wasn't his first or last perilous expedition. Along with Italian aeronautical engineer Umberto Nobile and their American financier Lincoln Ellsworth, he flew over the North Pole in a dirigible in 1926.

Following their flight, Amundsen and Nobile fell out, which sparked a public dispute over who should have been in charge of the expedition. The two of them developed a rivalry, but Amundsen put an end to it in 1928 when he learned that Nobile had crashed his airship, the Italia, while scouring the Arctic. In order to help with the rescue operations, Roald Amundsen and a French crew departed Troms on a Latham 47 floatplane on June 18, 1928. They vanished without a trace.

Everyone agrees that the jet crashed somewhere over the Barents Sea, killing everyone on board, but the exact location and cause are unknown. Although there are occasionally new searches, neither the bodies nor the wreckage have been found. The most recent one took place in 2009 when a crew unsuccessfully searched 45 square miles of the seafloor for the plane disaster using an underwater robot.