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The North Pole
The northern end of Earth's axis, a point on drifting sea ice above a deep ocean
At the North Pole, every direction is south. The geographic North Pole is the point where Earth's axis of rotation meets the surface in the north, and unlike its southern counterpart it has no land beneath it at all. It lies in the middle of the Arctic Ocean, on sea ice a few meters thick that drifts constantly, so a flag planted there is soon carried away. The sun rises once a year, around the March equinox, and sets once, around the September equinox. No country owns the Pole itself, but Russia, Denmark and Canada have each asked a United Nations body to recognize the seabed beneath it as part of their extended continental shelf.
The Pole sits roughly 700 kilometers from the nearest land, the small islands off Greenland's north coast. The ocean floor lies about 4,261 meters down, as measured by Russian submersibles in 2007. The pack ice moves with winds and currents, and in recent decades it has grown thinner and less extensive in summer, opening stretches of open water near the Pole in some years. The geographic Pole is distinct from the north magnetic pole, which has wandered from the Canadian Arctic toward Siberia, and from the Arctic pole of inaccessibility, the point in the ocean farthest from any coast. The nearest permanently staffed outpost is the Canadian station at Alert, about 817 kilometers away.
Who reached the Pole first remains disputed. Frederick Cook claimed to have done so in 1908 and Robert Peary in 1909, and both claims have been contested ever since. The airship Norge, carrying Roald Amundsen, Lincoln Ellsworth and Umberto Nobile, flew over it in 1926, and a Soviet party landed there by plane in 1948. The US submarine Nautilus passed beneath it in 1958, and Ralph Plaisted's 1968 snowmobile expedition is widely accepted as the first confirmed surface journey. Under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, Russia, Denmark (for Greenland) and Canada have filed overlapping seabed submissions that include the Pole, centered on the Lomonosov Ridge. A UN commission reviews the science, and any division of overlapping areas is left to the states.