This North Pole trivia quiz has 50 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 50 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
There is no land at all; the nearest, Kaffeklubben Island off northern Greenland, is 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
It climbs above the horizon around the March equinox, stays up all summer, and sets around September for six months of darkness.
Q 04Kaffeklubben Island, the nearest land to the North Pole, lies off which territory?
Greenland
The tiny Danish-Greenlandic island beats Canada's Cape Columbia by a few kilometres for the title of northernmost land.
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
His rival Frederick Cook claimed to have got there a year earlier with two Inuit companions, but could produce no convincing proof either.
Q 07Which African-American explorer on seven Peary voyages said his footprints were first at the 1909 'Pole'?
Matthew Henson
Congress gave him a duplicate of Peary's medal in 1944, and in 1988 he was reburied at Arlington National Cemetery beside Peary.
Q 08The first surface expedition confirmed to reach the North Pole, in April 1968, travelled by what?
Snowmobile
Ralph Plaisted's team of four Minnesotans and a Canadian rode Ski-Doos; a year later Wally Herbert's party became the first to arrive on foot.
Q 09The first vessel to reach the North Pole passed underneath it on 3 August 1958. What was it?
USS Nautilus
The world's first nuclear submarine made the transit during Operation Sunshine; USS Skate became the first to surface at the Pole the following March.
Q 10The first surface ship to reach the North Pole, in 1977, was a nuclear icebreaker from which country?
Soviet Union
Arktika smashed through on 17 August 1977; a Russian ice camp, Barneo, has been set up by air near the Pole every spring since 2002.
Q 11In 1990 Børge Ousland and Erling Kagge became the first explorers to reach the North Pole how?
Unsupported
They hauled everything from the start with no resupply or dogs; both Norwegians went on to reach the South Pole as well.
Q 12Ann Bancroft became the first woman to reach the North Pole on foot and by sled in which year?
1986
She was on the Steger International Polar Expedition; she later led the first all-female team to ski to the South Pole.
Q 13What became of Salomon August Andrée's 1897 hydrogen-balloon expedition to the North Pole?
They came down on the ice and died; remains found in 1930
Q 21The Arctic Circle, the line beyond which the midnight sun occurs, sits at roughly what latitude?
66.5° N
Land inside it is shared by eight countries: Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, the US, Canada, Denmark (Greenland) and Iceland, which only just makes it via the island of Grímsey.
Q 22How many countries have land inside the Arctic Circle?
Eight
Iceland only just qualifies, through the small offshore island of Grímsey; the others are Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, the US, Canada and Denmark via Greenland.
Q 23Polar bears are the largest land carnivores on Earth. What colour is their skin under the 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.
The balloon flew for 65 hours before icing forced it down; the three men trekked to Kvitøya, where a Norwegian expedition found their bodies, diaries and photographic negatives 33 years later.
Q 14Fridtjof 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
The drift did not pass over the Pole, so Nansen and Johansen struck out on skis and reached a record 86°13.6' N before retreating to Franz Josef Land.
Q 15Which polar pioneer vanished in 1928 while flying to search for the airship Italia's crew?
Roald Amundsen
Umberto Nobile's airship had come down returning from the Pole; the rescuer's plane vanished over the Barents Sea and was never found.
Q 16What did the Arktika 2007 expedition leave on the seabed at the North Pole?
A titanium national flag
The one-metre flag was planted by the submersible Mir-1 at a depth of 4,261 metres, and prompted protests from Canada and Denmark over Arctic claims.
Q 17What 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 18Which explorer first located the north magnetic pole in 1831?
James Clark Ross
He found it at Cape Adelaide on Canada's Boothia Peninsula; it has since wandered hundreds of kilometres and is now heading for Siberia.
Q 19In the 2000s and 2010s, the north magnetic pole drifted toward Russia at about what speed?
About 55-60 km a year
The speed jumped in the 1990s, forcing early updates to the World Magnetic Model that phones and ships rely on.
Q 20The Arctic Ocean, which surrounds the North Pole, ranks how among the world's five oceans by size?
Smallest
At about 14 million square kilometres it is also the shallowest, hemmed in by Russia, Norway, Canada, Alaska, Greenland and Iceland.
Q 24Which 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 25Reindeer, 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.
Q 26The idea that Santa Claus lives at the North Pole is often credited to which 19th-century illustrator?
Thomas Nast
His 1866 Harper's Weekly drawing was captioned 'Santa Claussville, N.P.', and a later poem placed the home 'near the North Pole, in the ice and snow'.
Q 27What postal code has Canada Post assigned to Santa Claus at the North Pole?
H0H 0H0
It spells out Santa's laugh; volunteers answer more than a million letters a year in dozens of languages, including Braille.
Q 28The town of North Pole, Alaska, near Fairbanks, is how far from the actual geographic North Pole?
Roughly 1,700 miles
Its streets include Santa Claus Lane, St. Nicholas Drive and Kris Kringle Drive, the streetlights are striped like candy canes, and its post office gets hundreds of thousands of letters to Santa.
Q 29A gift shop in North Pole, Alaska, boasts the world's largest fibreglass statue of which figure?
St. Nick
The Santa Claus House grew out of a trading post; local streetlights are painted as candy canes year-round.
Q 30Finland's Santa Claus Village sits on the Arctic Circle near which city?
Rovaniemi
The village opened in 1980 and includes a post office where visitors can read letters sent to Santa; Norway, for its part, claims he lives in Drøbak.