We were thus able to track the movements of instruments on the sea ice quite accurately. The transponder was a tube 15 centimetres in diameter and a metre and a half long. Just for fun, and because we were all convinced of the international value of our work, we applied below the name the flag of the United Nations the flags of all the circumpolar countries including of course the U.
These flags were sticky-paper prints from a school geography exercise book, designed for students to peel off and stick on descriptions of respective countries. We applied the flags in alphabetical order on the transponder, then sealed the whole instrument with fibreglass resin. As I wrote to my superior at the time, the North Pole, a point without dimensions, belongs to no country, and we hoped our work would be useful to all humankind.
The transponder worked well. We now had a real pole at the North Pole. Weyprecht would have been pleased: the geographical pole was being used for observing phenomena of planetary behaviour. Thus it came about that a Canadian party of scientists spontaneously placed the flags of the United Nations on the sea bed at the North Pole, 40 years before Russia noisily planted a second Russian flag for political reasons.
Soviet scientists at the time, of course, knew all about our activity. None of our work was secret or classified. And a couple of years later the director of the U. Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute congratulated us on a fine piece of work. After a full year of calculations and testing of new equipment, we went back to the North Pole in We had a larger party and a lot of sophisticated equipment, serviced by Twin Otter and Bristol Freighter aircraft.
Observations started right away and continued until 3 May. We made a large snow igloo, guaranteed non-metallic, to house the magnetic instruments. A few days later, about 12 kilometres away on the surface, we dropped a second one, thus improving the accuracy with which we could track our movement.
Work on five separate but coordinated projects went on around the clock. There were some interesting diversions during our month in residence at the North Pole. As it covered most degrees of longitude and the International Date Line, depending on which way around the course one went, one could finish the day before or the day after one started.
The pilots who flew the short hop-and-land gravity surveys had fun making out flight plans showing that they landed hours before or hours after they took off for a kilometre flight.
The artist Maurice Haycock produced some truly memorable paintings of North Pole scenery, some of which are now in galleries and institutes in different parts of the country. Toward the end of our stay there, I asked our Inuk technician how he felt being the first northern Indigenous person to work at the North Pole. He simply said, No foxes. No women. Sun gone crazy. After the second transponder was lowered and its signal confirmed, we had a bit of a celebration.
A half-used bottle of whisky was finished, and each of us rummaged through our pockets for a souvenir or message to put in the bottle and drop down the hole. We collected a couple of used tickets to the bar at Resolute, Maurice Haycock drew a little cartoon of six figures dancing around the pole and one fellow had an expired B. We stuffed it all in the bottle, put in the cork firmly, and shoved it down the hole in the three-metre-thick ice.
That was April The incident was pretty well forgotten, until in the spring of the mother of one of our pole party received at her Vancouver home a telephone call from a newspaper reporter asking whether she knew such-and-such a person. She replied that of course she knew him — he was her son — but he was working in the Arctic. She was alarmed at first, but there was no need for worry. A lady walking along the beach in northeast Iceland — a very sparsely inhabited bit of coastline — came across a bottle with some papers Inside.
We were all intrigued that the bottle had turned up. But by what route had it taken from the North Pole to northeast Iceland? How long did it take? There was no information about how long the bottle may have been lying on the beach in Iceland. Even if you drop something in mid-ocean at the North Pole, it will turn up somewhere. The careful measurements of satellite tracks, apparent movements of the stars, and the gravity surveys from this work enabled geophysicists and geodesists to calculate needed improvements in the mathematical shape of the planet in the region of the pole and in the gravity field that would influence satellites.
Calculations of satellite trajectories were corrected and navigation tables were updated, and the data was entered into formulas for Global Positioning Systems, which at that time were just being developed. The eccentric motion of the axis of rotation, the polar wobble, was noted over a few weeks, providing material for new speculation on the influence of geological, oceanic and possibly even major atmospheric events on the planetary balance.
It has not been announced in the West what positioning system the Russians use for navigation of their under-ice submarines; but it seems likely that they employ the modern universal formulae for the geoid and gravity field for northern high latitudes and the region surrounding the North Pole.
If so, their confidence that they planted their flag accurately at the North Pole in would be based at least in part on the measurements made by the Canadian party who were there 40 years ago and who placed the first Russian flag along with flags of other UN countries nearby. In , British explorer Tom Avery mimicked Peary's route using dog sleds, and reached the pole, suggesting that Peary's records might have been accurate. The Peary vs.
Cook debate remains controversial to this day. Since the days of Peary and Cook, many expeditions to the North Pole have taken place by plane, by foot and by dog sled. The National Geographic Society, one of his sponsors, confirmed the accomplishment. Byrd was hailed as a hero, given the Medal of Honor and went on to fly over the South Pole, as well as achieving many other polar expedition milestones.
However, Byrd's accomplishment was questioned almost immediately. Many did not think his airplane could have covered the distance in just 15 hours and 44 minutes, as he had recorded.
New research, published in the January issue of the journal Polar Record, suggests that Byrd fell short of his North Pole goal by as much as 80 miles km. The first verifiable, convincing expedition to the pole is credited to Roald Amundsen, an intrepid Norwegian explorer. In , Amundsen led the first expedition to cross the Northwest Passage.
In , Amundsen was the first person to reach the South Pole. And in May just a few days after Byrd's flight , Amundsen flew — or rather, floated — over the pole in a dirigible, the Norge, with 15 other men.
May 1, The first expedition to reach the pole on foot without resupply includes Ann Bancroft, the first woman to travel to the pole. His feat, accomplished wearing only a swim brief, was done to draw public attention to the melting ice caps. Currently, no country owns the North Pole. It sits in international waters. The closest land is Canadian territory Nunavut, followed by Greenland part of the Kingdom of Denmark. However, Russia, Denmark and Canada have staked claims to the mountainous Lomonosov Ridge that runs under the pole.
The Arctic is rich in natural resources, including oil and gas, and valuable as a shipping route, making it of high importance to countries with Arctic coasts. In , Russia sent the first submersible to reach the seabed under the North Pole, and dropped a titanium flag there — much to the displeasure of the other Arctic countries.
In December , Canada announced plans to submit a proposal to the United Nations claiming the North Pole as part of Canadian territory. Their claim will not go unchallenged — both Russia and Denmark are expected to file claims, as well. Believers know that no matter what the science or explorers say, the North Pole is home to flying reindeer and toy-making elves hard at work.
The movements of the stars and constellations also had myths or legends to explain their movement, as part of the Inuit navigation tradition. The Inuit people live on the coasts of three oceans — Atlantic, Arctic and Pacific — spanning almost 25 degrees of latitude, from the Labrador coast up to Northwest Greenland and the Canadian Arctic archipelago.
However, for all of the differences in landscape, dialect and vocabulary, their world is held together through these stories containing a complex knowledge of place. In addition to its place in the real world, the North Pole has also been linked to ideas of an Eden, a terrestrial paradise, a place of perfection or divine virtue, and a rich source of ideas for fiction writers.
One of the most extraordinary of these stories was written by proto-feminist Margaret Cavendish , Duchess of Newcastle. In her book The Description of a New World, called the Blazing-world , her female protagonist enters the world through the North Pole, and into a series of alternative worlds, each with its own political culture of hierarchies. In the last of these worlds, where power is a female attribute, she encounters the Empress of the North Pole and becomes her scribe.
Some have argued that the Empress is in fact a surrogate for Cavendish herself. Peary also attributed mythical powers to the North Pole, in the form of the god Antaeus, son of Gaia, a giant and unforgiving titan god rising out of the polar ice and into the heavens.
But once the North Pole had been reached by humans, what role did it then play in the worldly imagination? Two Battalions racing due North along the coast and foothills with levelled bayonets. Knowing by experience that he would soon be up to it, he used his pole with all his might, hoping to steer clear of it. Edmund de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, on account of his near relationship to the house of York, beheaded.
Then, having shot nothing that day, he turned towards the Pole with a feeling of disappointment.
0コメント