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The Earth has two poles, a North Pole and a South Pole. Well, okay, it has four if you want to split hairs and differentiate between the geographic poles (the two points where the Earth's surface intercepts its axis of rotation) and the magnetic poles (the two points where the Earth's surface intercepts an imaginary giant bar magnet positioned such that its field provides the best possible approximation of the Earth's magnetic field). Well, okay, strictly speaking those bar magnet poles are the *geomagnetic* poles, which are actually distinct from the true magnetic poles, where...look, we're getting off track here. This article is about the geographic poles, mostly the Geographic North Pole. Imagine an old school desk globe, which spins about an axle. We're talking about the points where the axle goes into / comes out of the ball which turns.
The two geographic poles are *conceptually* symmetric. There's nothing special about one to differentiate it from the other, in terms of the rotation of the Earth. But *geographically* they are pretty distinct beasts. The South Pole is in Antarctica. The thing about Antarctica is, it's a bona fide continent. Underneath all the snow and the ice, there's solid rock, stuff that is connected to the Earth's crust. If you go the Geographic South Pole and you stick a flag there (or maybe a large red and white diagonally striped pole with a shiny sphere on top, like you see in cartoons and which, believe it or not, there *actually is*, although it's a few metres away from the genuine pole, just there for photo opportunities), then you could come back fifty years later and your flag would still be there, assuming you stuck it in firmly enough that it didn't blow away. The South Pole is basically a permanent *place* where you can stick stuff. This has proven a tremendously convenient for research and exploration in the region, and in fact the United States' Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station has been continuously occupied since the 1950s.
The North Pole isn't like this at all. There's no continent under it, there's "just" the Arctic Ocean. The Arctic Ocean is, of course, pretty cold, and so the Northernmost parts of it are always covered in ice (or historically have been, anyway. The ice retreats in the warmer Summer months but has always stopped well short of actually disappearing, but thanks to climate change it's speculated that the whole darn ocean could start being totally ice free during Summer later this century), which means you don't have to swim to the North Pole, you can in fact walk or ski or sled or fly there, and if you make it you can stick up a flag, rather than having to leave a buoy. But you're walking on a non-permanent layer of ice, just a few metres thick in most places, which drifts around on top of the ocean, occasionally cracking, melting, colliding with other bits of ice, and so on. Come back in fifty years time and your flag will be on the bottom of the ocean floor because that particular chunk of ice you stuck it on is no longer with us. This makes building a big, fancy, expensive, permanently crewed research station close to the North Pole a less than appealing prospect, so it's no wonder scientists tend to hang out down South, instead.
It's not *too* bad these days. The Russians have a fleet of gigantic nuclear-powered icebreakers which can be piloted right to the pole, which they did for the first time in 1977 with the ship Arktika (lead ship of the Arktika class, of which six were built, two of which are still in service, including Arktika itself). These things have a crew of 75 people and can stay at sea for six months at a time, not exactly the same as a permanent research station, but not a bad substitute. This article isn't about these luxurious, Johnny-come-lately icebreakers, though. This is about the good old days, when the North Pole was hard work. And not the *early* good old days, when it was all about simply *getting* to the North Pole, being the first, sticking a flag in the ground and taking a photo before heading right back home to bask in the fame and glory, assuming anybody believed you really made it, which they often didn't. No, this is about the days of serious, hard working, long-haul scientific expeditions to the poles in a time when you couldn't just hop on an atom-smashing juggernaut for a leisurely cruise up North.
Starting in 1937, right up until its collapse in 1991, the Soviet Union operated a series of drifting ice research stations. They were named sequentially, much like space missions, beginning with North Pole-1 (NP-1) right up to North Pole-31 (NP-31). In fact, the Russian Federation picked the program up again and continued with the same name and numbering scheme, with NP-32 established in 2004, but it's the earlier, primitive Soviet stations that fascinate me. These were basically not much more than ambitious camping expeditions, where a small team (just four people for NP-1!) were dropped off on a suitable seeming chunk of drifting ice, either by plane or ship, and left there, to live and work in tents, or later wooden huts, for as long as that particular chunk of ice stayed in one solid piece, at which point they were evacuated. The whole enterprise seems like it must have been shrouded in constant unpredictability. Some of these stations lasted "only" nine months (a long time to live in tents on a chunk of drifting ice!), but NP-22 managed an astonishing life-span of almost nine years, from September 13th, 1973 until April 8th, 1982, such a long time that NP-23 and NP-24 lived out their entire operational lives in parallel in the same window. It must have been more or less impossible to predict in advance how long a particular station would last, and it would been impossible, in an era before computational fluid dynamics and supercomputing, to predict a particular station's drift course beyond the very immediate future. These stations drifted around aimlessly, uncontrolled, over routes thousands of kilometres long. The long-lived NP-22 travelled 17,000 km during its lifetime! Without satellite navigation, they must have been plotting their course using celestial navigation, like sailors. Being able to regularly report at least an approximate location via radio back to the Russian mainland must have been an absolute top priority in order for resupply and rescue missions to be feasible. Not only that, this would have been important scientific data, providing information about the region's ocean currents. The uncontrollable, unpredictable drifting of these stations naturally means that the "North Pole" name of the stations was strictly aspirational: it wasn't until 1972 that NP-19 actually had the good fortune to drift through the genuine Geographic North Pole.
You'll have noticed a lot of speculation in the above, a lot of "it must have" this, "they must have" that. The truth is I do not know an awful lot about what the daily living conditions on NP expeditions were like. More or less the entire program took place during the Cold War, and most of the information was classified, due to the strategic importance of techniques and technology for navigating and aviating in the Arctic, where both the Soviet and US militaries were operating submarines. In fact, when the Soviets hastily abandoned NP-8 in 1962 after a collision with another ice floe rendered it unsafe, the CIA launched "Operation COLDFEET", in which two US operatives were parachuted onto NP-8's ice floe to scoop up all the Soviet equipment left behind, the men and the loot being picked up via "Skyhook". But early Soviet space exploration was also heavily classified in its day, and I can personally assure you that today it's no problem at all for somebody who can't read Russian to deeply geek out on that. You can read about every spacecraft, every probe, every rocket, every mission in excruciating technical detail, online and also in published books. For some reason, early Soviet Arctic exploration does not appear to have received the same attention. I've learned basically all of the above from a handful of Wikipedia articles, which are enough to whet the appetite but ultimately provide not much more than a rudimentary sketch. There's a table with the starting and ending dates and coordinates, with total distance drifted, for every single one of these NP stations, as well as the claim that "on average, an NP station is the host for 600 to 650 ocean depth measurements, 3,500 to 3,900 complex meteorology measurements, 1,200 to 1,300 temperature measurements and sea water probes for chemical analysis, and 600 to 650 research balloon launches", all of which suggests that a lot of cold, hard data is now declassified and out there, somewhere, for the taking. But this is mostly just "big number boasting", which makes the program as a whole sound impressive and grand in scope, but doesn't give you a real feel for the day to day. Only NP-1 and NP-2 have their own standalone Wikipedia articles, and they are quite short. Somehow there's no article about NP-22 and its record breaking nine year drift. You can find some grainy black and white photos via Google Image Search, and various articles which don't do too much more than restate what's in Wikipedia. Ivan Dmitrievich Papanin, leader of the NP-1 expedition, wrote a book about his experience, which was even translated into English as "Life on an Ice Floe", but it's been out of print for a long time and is now rare and expensive. There's a scientific journal paper, in English but by Russian authors who presumably have easier access to good information, but it's pay-walled. In short, there is certainly a lot more information out there than in my rough sketch above, but really fanatical deep-diving still needs to be done. My shallow diving has turned up mostly unanswered questions and potent fuel for the imagination.
What were living conditions during the very earliest NP expeditions like? How often were they crews in contact with civilisation? How often were they resupplied? What kind of technology were they living and working with? How do you get scientific research done in almost constant darkness during polar winter? Did they have batteries that worked well in sub-zero temperatures in the 1930s? Were they running diesel generators 24/7? Did anybody ever get really sick or injured up there? How did they cope psychologically? NP-1 had a crew of four people and lasted for nine months, in the late 1930s. Did that kind of long term, close quarters isolation in an extreme environment have any kind of precedent back then, before space stations or nuclear submarines? How much leisure time, if any, did the explorers get and how did they spend it? What did they eat?
Were there any noodles?