Cracking the big mystery about ice at North Pole
My daughter has just sent a letter to Santa, addressed to his home at the North Pole, where we all know he lives.
As I watched her drop the letter in a postbox, a thought occurred to me – just when was it discovered that there was no land at the Pole? – P.
The North Pole is in the middle of the Arctic Ocean and is almost permanently covered with constantly shifting sea ice.
It was suspected that there was an ocean below the ice as early as the 16th Century.
In 1527 Englishman Robert Thorn sent a pair of ships to look for a north-west passage to India through the North Pole but without success.
Other attempts to reach the North Pole followed, including William Edward Parry, who was forced to turn back in 1827, and Norwegians
Fridtjof Nansen and Fredrik Hjalmar Johansen in 1895.
Frederick Cook, in 1908, and Robert Peary, the following year both thought they had reached the Pole, but both claims were later rejected.
In 1926, Norwegian Roald Amundsen flew over the Pole in an airship, the Norge.
The first men to stand on the Pole were 24 Russians who flew in on three planes that briefly touched down on the ice in 1948.
However, as proof that there was no land beneath the Pole, American sub, the USS Nautilus, reached the Pole on August 3, 1958, and the USS Skate surfaced at the Pole, breaking through the ice above it, in 1959.
The ice is approximately 10ft-12ft thick at the Pole, so Santa is in no danger of falling into the depths of the Arctic Ocean!