Colonization of the North Pole

Colonization of the North Pole refers to having a permanent human presence at the North Pole.

An idea is to have a North Pole city enclosed under glass domes (Domed city) which would make colonization of the North Pole possible. A light source at the top of the central tower would be an artificial sun during the dark months at the North Pole. However, there are problems:

The sea ice at the North Pole is drifting all the time, in a direction away from Siberia toward Greenland. Soviet and American scientists sometimes set up research stations on the thicker parts of the ice and go with the flow. A station might drift a thousand miles or more during its lifetime.

If glass domes were built on the ice at the North Pole, they wouldn't stay there. They would drift away. If the glass domes were built on the floor of the sea, right smack at the North Pole as an underwater factory that's entered and exitted by submarine also would have problems. The floor of the Arctic Ocean has a tricky way of moving around with respect to the pole. The geographical North Pole is defined as the place where the Earth's spin axis intersects the crust. But the body of the Earth wobbles with respect to the rotation axis (Milankovitch cycles), something an astronomer named Chandler discovered back in 1891. The Earth wobbles like the wheel of a car when a tire gets out of balance.

It's not much of a wobble. The Earth's crust wobbles about the pole in a circle about 50 feet in diameter every 14 months. Still, if a glass dome were built on the floor of the sea, it would wobble too.

There is also plate tectonics. The Earth's solid crust is like a broken eggshell. The pieces of the eggshell, or plates, move this way and that at the rate of an inch or two a year. In a million years or so that can add up to a real change in the address of people living at the North Pole.

And recently it has been suspected that sometimes the Earth gets really out of balance. The tendency is for the heaviest part of the planet to move toward the equator, in response to centrifugal force. Over millions of years, the entire crust and mantle can slip by hundreds or thousands of miles with respect to the axis of rotation. Scientists can now pinpoint the position of the North Pole with an accuracy of a few inches, and they do it by bouncing laser beams off of the moon or artificial satellites, or by comparing the difference in arrival times at several radio telescopes of signals from quasars billions of light years away.

International agreements presently limit activities at the North Pole.

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