North Pole Was Here Puzzles And Perils at the Top of the World

Chapter One Where All Is South For nearly two hours, I have been staring out a small window on a droning propeller-driven airplane. The low, unsetting sun casts the plane's shadow off to the side, where it slides over what looks like an endless crinkled white landscape. But there is no land below us. There is only an ocean-a frozen one. We are flying out across a cap of floating, drifting ice that's the size of the United States. As far as the eye can see, colliding plates of ice raise jumbled miles-long ridges, some as high as houses. Here and there, the ice is split by cracks that expose the black depths of the Arctic Ocean underneath. The plane is jammed with instruments and survival gear and scientists heading to the top of the world to study climate changes at the pole. Nearly five hundred miles ago, we left the most northern spot where people can live year-round, a Canadian military base called Alert, and headed farther north- as far north as you can go before you suddenly find yourself pointed south again. Researchers have long been measuring a global warming trend, but it is in the Arctic that temperatures have risen the most. This research team is trying to understand why conditions are changing and what the changes may mean for people and the environment. Finally, the pilot says we are nearing our destination. The plane's shadow grows as we descend. We are all overheated and sweating, stuffed into puffy layers of clothing and huge insulated boots. But no one else seems quite as nervous as I am about what is coming. In a few moments, the pilot is going to set this fifteen-ton rubber-tired airplane down on a rough runway scraped across the eight-foot-thick sea ice. The crew and scientists around me, who have done this for several years in a row, are munching peanut butter sandwiches and apples, reading books, chatting. I tighten my seatbelt. The Arctic has claimed the lives of many of the people who have been brave enough, or crazy enough, to press north. I wonder if the ice will hold, or if it will crack open and swallow the plane. We finally touch down. There is a quick series of thumps and bumps and the rising roar of engines thrown into reverse. The propellers raise clouds of sparkling whiteness called "diamond dust"-crystals of flash-frozen sea mist far finer than snowflakes. A hatch opens and we climb down aluminum steps. Quite suddenly, I am standing on top of the world, about sixty miles from the spot around which the earth spins. The frigid air bites at my cheeks. The bright sun forces me to squint. My boots scrunch on what feels like snow- covered ground. It takes a few moments before I remember I am walking on floating ice that is drifting about four hundred yards an hour over an ocean two miles deep-deep enough that ten Empire State Buildings could be stacked beneath us without breaking the surface. I am standing at the earth's last real edge, the last place where people cannot get very comfortable for very long. Unlike the planet's South Pole-where a continent is home to permanent research stations and dozens of scientists, engineers, cooks, doctors, and other staff-at the North Pole nothing is permanent except the seabed far below. The ice that is here today will be somewhere else tomorrow. In a few years, much of what I am walking on, what our airplane landed on, will break up and slide out of the Arctic Ocean altogether through passages around Greenland, replaced by newly formed ice. A visitor once left a message in a container on the ice near this spot. It was found on a beach in Ireland a few years later. A couple of weeks ago, Russian workers flew here from Siberia to plow the runway intoRevkin, Andrew is the author of 'North Pole Was Here Puzzles And Perils at the Top of the World', published 2007 under ISBN 9780753461389 and ISBN 0753461382.