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This North Pole trivia quiz has 45 free questions with answers and covers the real place and the legend. The real one is a spot in the middle of the Arctic Ocean with no land, four kilometres of water below the ice, one sunrise and one sunset a year, no time zone and no permanent residents. The quiz follows the race to reach it: Nansen freezing his ship into the pack, Andrée's doomed balloon, Peary and Cook's rival claims, Amundsen's airship, the first snowmobiles, submarines, icebreakers and women to arrive, and the titanium Russian flag on the seabed. The legend gets its due too: how Santa came to live there, the Canadian postcode H0H 0H0, the Alaskan town of North Pole with its candy-cane streetlights, Finland's rival claim at Rovaniemi, NORAD's Santa tracker and the films that put Buddy the Elf and the Polar Express on the ice. Wildlife rounds it out: polar bears, reindeer and why there are no penguins. Every answer has been checked against a reference encyclopaedia, and each question shows its explanation and citation once you have answered.
30 of 45 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Unlike the South Pole, the geographic North Pole sits on what?
Shifting sea ice over deep ocean
The Pole sits on shifting sea ice a few metres thick over the deep Arctic Ocean; the nearest land, Kaffeklubben Island, lies about 700 km away.
Q 02How deep is the ocean directly beneath the North Pole, as measured by a Russian submersible in 2007?
About 4,261 m
The Mir submersibles that took the sounding also planted a one-metre titanium Russian flag on the seabed on 2 August 2007.
Q 03How many times a year does the sun rise at the North Pole?
Once
The sun rises just once a year, around the March equinox, circles the sky all summer, and sets around the September equinox for six months of polar night.
Q 04Kaffeklubben Island, the nearest land to the North Pole, lies off which territory?
Greenland
Kaffeklubben Island lies off Greenland's north coast at 83°40′N, 37 km east of Cape Morris Jesup and about 700 km from the Pole; beyond it lie only shifting gravel banks.
Q 05Which American sponsored the 1926 airship flight that first verifiably reached the North Pole?
Lincoln Ellsworth
Ellsworth flew aboard the Norge with Amundsen and Umberto Nobile on 12 May 1926; the same trio's Italian designer would crash the airship Italia two years later.
Q 06Which American explorer's claim to have reached the North Pole on 6 April 1909 remains disputed?
Robert Peary
Robert Peary's 6 April 1909 claim rests on his own unverified records; rival Frederick Cook claimed to have reached the Pole a year earlier, and neither man produced convincing proof.
Q 07Which African-American explorer on seven Peary voyages said his footprints were first at the 1909 'Pole'?
Matthew Henson
Matthew Henson, Peary's companion on seven Arctic voyages, received a duplicate of Peary's medal from Congress in 1944 and was reburied beside Peary at Arlington National Cemetery in 1988.
Q 08The first surface expedition confirmed to reach the North Pole, in April 1968, travelled by what?
Snowmobile
Ralph Plaisted's four-man party, three Minnesotans and Canadian Jean-Luc Bombardier, reached the Pole by snowmobile on 19 April 1968, the first surface arrival ever confirmed by independent observers.
Q 09Which vessel first reached the North Pole, passing beneath it on 3 August 1958?
USS Nautilus
USS Nautilus, the world's first nuclear submarine, crossed beneath the Pole on 3 August 1958 during Operation Sunshine; USS Skate became the first to surface there in March 1959.
Q 10In 1990 Børge Ousland and Erling Kagge became the first explorers to reach the North Pole how?
Unsupported
Unsupported means no resupply, dogs or outside help; Ousland and Kagge man-hauled their sledges about 800 km from Ellesmere Island to the Pole in 58 days in 1990.
Q 11Ann Bancroft became the first woman to reach the North Pole on foot and by sled in which year?
1986
Ann Bancroft reached the Pole on 1 May 1986 with Will Steger's dog-sled expedition; in January 1993 she led the first all-female team to ski to the South Pole.
Q 12Fridtjof Nansen's plan for reaching the North Pole in the 1890s was to do what with his ship Fram?
Freeze it into the pack ice and drift
Nansen let Fram freeze into the pack ice north of Siberia in 1893 so the drift would carry it toward the Pole; when it fell short, he and one companion skied to a record 86°13.6′N in 1895.
Q 13Which polar pioneer vanished in 1928 while flying to search for the airship Italia's crew?
Q 21What colour is a polar bear's skin beneath its fur?
Black
The black skin absorbs heat and the guard hairs are hollow and unpigmented; they are classed as marine mammals because they depend on the sea ice.
Q 22Which of these animals would you NOT find anywhere near the North Pole?
Penguin
Penguins live almost exclusively in the Southern Hemisphere; the only species that strays north of the equator is the Galápagos penguin.
Q 23Reindeer, Santa's supposed sleigh-pullers, are unique among deer in what way?
Females may grow antlers
In North America the same species is called caribou; its range circles the whole Arctic from Scandinavia through Siberia to Canada.
Roald Amundsen
Roald Amundsen took off from Tromsø on 18 June 1928 in a Latham 47 flying boat to search for Nobile's crew; the plane disappeared over the Barents Sea, and only a float and a fuel tank were ever recovered.
Q 14Who headed the four-man crew of North Pole-1, the Soviet drifting ice station of 1937?
Ivan Papanin
Ivan Papanin and three companions lived on the North Pole-1 floe for 274 days, from May 1937 until icebreakers picked them up off Greenland in February 1938.
Q 15What time zone is used at the North Pole?
Whatever suits the expedition
All lines of longitude meet there, so every time zone is equally valid; teams usually keep Greenwich Mean Time or the time of their home base.
Q 16Which explorer first located the north magnetic pole in 1831?
James Clark Ross
James Clark Ross reached the north magnetic pole at Cape Adelaide on the Boothia Peninsula on 1 June 1831; the pole has since wandered more than 1,000 km across the Arctic.
Q 17In the 2000s and 2010s, the north magnetic pole drifted toward Russia at about what speed?
About 55-60 km a year
The north magnetic pole sped up from about 15 km a year in the 1990s to roughly 55-60 km a year, forcing an early 2019 update to the World Magnetic Model that phones and ships use.
Q 18The Arctic Ocean, which surrounds the North Pole, ranks how among the world's five oceans by size?
Smallest
The Arctic is the smallest and shallowest of the five oceans at about 14 million square kilometres, hemmed in by Russia, Norway, Greenland, Canada and the United States.
Q 19The Arctic Circle, the line beyond which the midnight sun occurs, sits at roughly what latitude?
66.5° N
The Arctic Circle runs at about 66.5°N (66°33′), the latitude where the sun stays above the horizon for at least one full day each summer; it creeps north about 15 m a year as Earth's tilt changes.
Q 20How many countries have land inside the Arctic Circle?
Eight
Eight countries have land inside the circle: Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, the United States, Canada, Denmark via Greenland, and Iceland, which qualifies only through the offshore island of Grímsey.
Q 24The idea that Santa Claus lives at the North Pole is often credited to which 19th-century illustrator?
Thomas Nast
Thomas Nast's 1866 Harper's Weekly drawing 'Santa Claus and His Works' carried the caption 'Santa Claussville, N.P.', and George P. Webster's companion poem placed the home 'near the North Pole, in the ice and snow'.
Q 25What postal code has Canada Post assigned to Santa Claus at the North Pole?
H0H 0H0
H0H 0H0 spells out Santa's 'ho ho ho'; Canada Post volunteers answer more than a million letters a year in dozens of languages, including Braille.
Q 26The town of North Pole, Alaska, near Fairbanks, is how far from the actual geographic North Pole?
Roughly 1,700 miles
North Pole, Alaska, lies at about 64.75°N near Fairbanks, roughly 1,700 miles (2,800 km) from the geographic pole; its streets include Santa Claus Lane and St. Nicholas Drive.
Q 27A gift shop in North Pole, Alaska, boasts the world's largest fibreglass statue of which figure?
St. Nick
Santa Claus House, opened by Con and Nellie Miller as a trading post in 1952, fronts a towering fibreglass St. Nick billed as the world's largest; the town's streetlights are striped like candy canes.
Q 28Finland's Santa Claus Village sits on the Arctic Circle near which city?
Rovaniemi
Santa Claus Village stands on the Arctic Circle about 8 km north of Rovaniemi, Lapland's capital; the site began with a cabin built for Eleanor Roosevelt's visit in 1950.
Q 29Which retailer's misprinted 1955 phone-number ad led to NORAD's annual Santa tracking?
Sears
A 1955 Sears ad in Colorado Springs printed a number that rang the Continental Air Defense Command; Colonel Harry Shoup reportedly played along, and NORAD kept the tradition after its creation in 1958.
Q 30Who plays Santa in the 2003 film Elf?
Ed Asner
Ed Asner played Santa; Bob Newhart is Papa Elf and narrator, James Caan is Buddy's father Walter Hobbs, and Jon Favreau directed.