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What’s really hiding at the North Pole?

Images of the Arctic Ocean usually involve pictures of ships sailing through broken sea ice floes. But if you search the Internet for the “North Pole” and look at a map, what you will see is an outline of the coasts of Russia, Canada and Greenland with a large blank expanse of white representing the (shrinking) polar icecap.

We imagine the North Pole is located in a vast, featureless, frozen ocean stretching to the horizon. But that view is flawed. It is only a part of the picture. It is not the whole of what is really lying at the North Pole.

We don’t mean Santa’s toy factory (this is so far unconfirmed by science). We mean the true face of the earth that lies unseen, hidden beneath the ocean surface. We are talking about the deep ocean floor!

And what we find is that from a deep-sea perspective, the North Pole lies in a fascinating location, sandwiched between a mid-ocean spreading ridge (the Gakkel Spreading Ridge) and a rifted fragment of the Eurasian continent (the Lomonosov Ridge). The North Pole lies on ocean crust that is less than 80 million years old on the floor of the Makarov Basin. It is nestled in a bend of the Lomonosov Ridge, in an amphitheater fed by several submarine canyons that debouch sediment onto the Basin floor from the Ridge.

The Arctic Ocean geomorphic features map shown in three-dimensional view. The North Pole shown with a white dot. By Debhasish Bhakta
The Arctic Ocean geomorphic features map shown in three-dimensional view. The North Pole shown with a white dot. By Debhasish Bhakta

The Gakkel Spreading Ridge is the northernmost extension of the mid-Atlantic ridge, passing northward from Iceland and zig-zagging northwards of Svalbard into the Arctic Ocean. Around 80 million years ago, seafloor spreading along the Gakkel Ridge caused a sliver of northern Russia to split off from the continent, forming the Lomonosov Ridge. The Gakkel Ridge is flanked by two deep basins, the Barents Abyssal Plain (over 3,000 meters deep) and the Makarov Basin (over 4,000 meters deep).

Seafloor mapping has made huge progress in recent decades with many countries investing in documenting the deep seafloor habitats, resources and other environmental assets that they must manage. Norway’s MAREANO programme is a good example. These programmes are essential for gathering the data needed by governments to make wise decisions into the twenty-first century. The 2007 Arktika expedition by Russia made the first submersible decent to the North Pole sea floor and documented the water depth to be 4,236 meters. So far, scientists have not located Santa’s toy factory but the search continues!

Seafloor geomorphic features of the North Pole based on Harris et al. (2014).
Seafloor geomorphic features of the North Pole based on Harris et al. (2014).