What's it really like at the North Pole?

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The North Pole is, in geographical terms, the absolute tippy-top of our small, spinning blue planet: the point where the Earth’s axis emerges from the surface in the Northern Hemisphere. It is the yin to the South Pole’s yang, although the comparison rather falls apart once you arrive. The South Pole has a continent underneath it. The North Pole has an ocean.

This means that if you were hoping to find a sturdy bit of ground, perhaps with a little sign saying NORTH POLE, THIS WAY, you are going to be disappointed.

There is no land here, no permanent ice palace and certainly no polar bears in bow ties. Instead, there is a vast, frozen ocean, with sea ice drifting about on the Arctic Ocean like a gigantic, badly refrigerated cocktail.

It is an extraordinary place, and scientists have understandably taken an interest in it. To keep watch over all this frozen activity, two satellites, NOAA-20 and Suomi NPP, have been deployed as part of the Joint Polar Satellite System. They orbit from pole to pole an astonishing fourteen times a day, while the Earth turns sedately beneath them, presumably wondering what all the fuss is about.

The satellites are separated by about 50 minutes. This may sound like an unnecessarily elaborate arrangement for two machines that have no need to make conversation, but there is a very good reason for it. Their carefully choreographed orbits allow scientists to build up continuous, looping images of the Arctic, watching the ice move, shrink and melt.

It is rather like an endless ice show, except that the performers are enormous sheets of sea ice and the audience consists largely of climate scientists staring intently at computer screens.

And this brings us to the less cheerful part.

Unlike Antarctica, which is a continent inconveniently buried beneath a vast quantity of ice, the North Pole is ocean. The ice floating on it is therefore rather more vulnerable to changes in temperature and conditions. Over the past four decades, Arctic sea ice has been thinning and retreating, particularly during the summer months.

It is difficult not to find this unsettling. The Arctic seems to be losing its ice with the quiet efficiency of someone removing the cubes from your drink when you aren’t looking. You return a few minutes later and discover that what was once refreshingly Arctic is now merely lukewarm.

And nobody wants a warm Arctic.

Especially not the Arctic.