Drifting upwind is a little hard to believe, but on the other hand, it would take a fair bit of courage to drift with the ice like Nansen just to see for yourself.

Let's try making a mini-sea in the laboratory and experiment with that instead. We want to set up

a wind blowing on a rotating sea.

We can blow air across the surface of a water tank, and place the whole apparatus, fan and all, on a rotating table.