[ The North Pole ]
Everything You Ever Wanted
to Know About the North Pole
What is the North Pole?
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The North Pole, the northernmost point on the Earth, can be defined in four different ways. Only the first two definitions are commonly used. However it is defined, the North Pole lies in the Arctic Ocean.
The Geographic North Pole, also known as True North, is the northernmost point on the Earth as determined by the planet's rotation. It has a known fixed position, at latitude 90° North. The boundaries of Canada extend all the way to the Geographic North Pole. There is no land at this location, which is usually covered by sea ice.
The Magnetic North Pole is the northern point at which the geomagnetic field points vertically, i.e. the dip is 90°. This definition was proposed by Sir William Gilbert, a courtier of Queen Elizabeth I, in 1600 and is still used. Despite its name, it is a south magnetic pole, because the North Pole (labelled N) of every other magnet is attracted to it, and opposite magnetic poles attract each other. Its location (in 2003) is 78°18' North, 104° West, near Ellef Ringness Island, one of the Queen Elizabeth Islands, in Canada.
The Geomagnetic North Pole is the pole of the Earth's geomagnetic field closest to true north. Like Magnetic North, it is a south magnetic pole. It is the centre of the region in the magnetosphere in which the Aurora Borealis can be seen. Its present location is 78°30' North, 69° West, near Thule in Greenland.
The Northern Pole of Inaccessibility is defined as the point in the Arctic farthest from any coastline, and is at 84°03' North, 174°51' West. It is of interest mainly to explorers and crackpot conspiracy theorists, and was first visited in 1927.
Astronomers define the north "geographic" pole of a planet in the solar system by the planetary pole that is in the same ecliptic hemisphere as the Earth's North Pole. For the magnetic poles, their names are decided upon by the direction that their field lines emerge or enter the planet's crust. If they enter the same way as they do for Earth at the North Pole, we call this the planet's north magnetic pole. Magnetic poles can flip flop from north to south and back again. The Earth's poles have done this repeatedly throughout history, and 500,000 years ago, the south magnetic pole was at the North Pole. It is thought that this occurs when the circulation of liquid nickel/iron in the Earth's outer core is disrupted and then reestablishes itself in the opposite direction. It is not known what causes these disruptions.
The Arctic Ocean located entirely in the North Pole region, is the smallest of the world's oceans. It occupies a roughly circular basin and covers an area of about 14,090,000 square kilometers (5,440,000 sq mi). Nearly landlocked, the ocean is surrounded by the land masses of Europe, Asia, North America, and Greenland and a number of islands, as well as by the Barents, Beaufort, Chukchi, Kara, Laptev, East Siberian, Lincoln, Wandel, Greenland, and Norwegian seas. It is connected to the Pacific Ocean by the Bering Strait and to the Atlantic Ocean through the Greenland Sea.
Light at the North Pole
Click here to see the current light conditions at the North Pole as viewed from space. The center of the map is the geographic North Pole. (This may take some time on a slow connection.)
