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NNo place on Earth is likely to generate as much interest in the coming decades as the Arctic. The polar region is rapidly evolving because of climate change, in turn opening it to new tourism and resource development. Canada’s North makes up a significant chunk of the Arctic, which makes it an ideal focus for the second themed issue in our year-long celebration of Canada’s sesquicentennial. Indeed, as Arctic ice melts and attention turns north, the North Pole itself has become a hot spot. Three nations — Canada, Denmark and Russia — have made, or intend to make, submissions to the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf to claim it falls within their boundaries. And who better to explain the international significance of the North Pole than the late Fred Roots? In June 2015, we named Roots, then 93, one of the nation’s top explorers because of his pioneering polar expeditions and scientific research — among numerous accomplishments, he helped author the Antarctic Treaty. Around the time of that issue, Roots sent us an essay he’d written on the North Pole in response to the recent international wrangling. You’ll find it in our March/april issue (unfortunately, too late for Roots to see it in print; he passed away in October 2016 at 94). Of course, in Canada, the North describes a swath of land much larger than the area around the pole. So we’ve collected a group of stories that cover a range of issues affecting this broadly defined place. Combined, they show a slice of the significance our North has to Canadians and the world.