In the summer of 2021, Norwegian explorer Bjorn Larsen and Italian archaeologist Paolo Serengetti are completing a wide-ranging archaeological survey along the north coast of the Norwegian Arctic archipelago of Svalbard on board the research vessel Polar Quest. The objective of their expedition is to locate any surviving evidence of the disastrous 1928 Italia dirigible expedition to the North Pole. But instead of finding the lost airship in a remote fjord of the archipelago, they stumble instead upon a previously unknown shipwreck. As the identity of their discovery becomes apparent, so too does its magnitude: a submarine that appears to be the same Nautilus described by Jules Verne in the novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. It soon becomes evident to Serengetti and Larsen that Verne's famous novel was not a dramatic imaginative science fiction story, but a fictionalized account of an undersea voyage that actually took place in 1867.