Naturalist's Almanac

It's no wonder that during the Christmas season Santa Claus wants to leave home and travel around a bit. In December, the North Pole has to be one of the most inhospitable places on Earth.

For starters, it's three months into the six-month darkness that reigns from the fall equinox in September until the spring equinox in March. Just a few days before Christmas, at the winter solstice, the sun never even peeps above the horizon, making that particular day one long night.

It's also cold — as in totally frozen. Because there's no land at the North Pole, Santa had to build his workshop on ice. The polar ice pack is a jumbled mass that cracks, jams, melts a bit, and refreezes, creating a surface that's difficult to navigate.

But at least Santa doesn't have to worry about falling through. When the first submarine, the U.S.S. Nautilus, traveled under the polar ice pack to reach the North Pole by water, it measured thicknesses of up to fifty feet.

In addition to being dark and cold, what Santa called the North Pole yesterday might not be the North Pole tomorrow. That's because the polar ice pack floats, moving with the currents of the Arctic Ocean.

So Santa has to keep relocating his workshop to be sure he's where he's supposed to be — at the geographic North Pole, the point where the Earth's axis would emerge if it were a metal rod as our familiar globes imply.

Furthermore, if Santa gets lost, he can't use a compass to find his way home. A compass would point him to the magnetic North Pole, which is different from the geographic North Pole. Magnetic north is not a fixed point but a shifting region that's currently about a thousand miles from where Santa wants to be.

If Santa ever became totally disoriented in the darkness on his floating ice pack, with a shifting magnetic pole trying to lure him off in the wrong direction, the best thing for him to do is probably what he already does at the end of his Christmas travels: point his trusty reindeer directly toward the North Star and count on them to find their way home.

MORE INFORMATION

Arctic Theme Page
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/education.html

When you first see the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Arctic theme page you may think you’ve hit a dud because there are no pictures or graphics or anything else to attract your visual attention. But if you look more closely you will see what a wealth of information is available from this starting point. First, check out their own offerings by visiting their Gallery (which includes archival photos of Robert Peary in 1909), their Essays (which include Ask an Expert answers to intriguing questions) and their Frequently Asked Questions (which include answers to most of the common questions you might be asking). They also list 30-some links to other Web sites that invite further explorations of the arctic.

Magnetic North
http://geo.phys.uit.no/articl/roadto.html

One aspect of the North Pole that fascinates me is the existence of two of them: geographic and magnetic. This Web link will take you to a substantial essay on the history of magnetism, compasses, and the discovery of the magnetic north.