The North Pole. On nature, myth making and melting ice

The North Pole is a fragmentary and personal biography about a unique set of coordinates on top of the world that has been claimed and re-claimed by egocentric, curious people from all over the world, much like Erling Kagge himself. The geographic North Pole is so much more than its common definition; The northernmost point of the world. This “so much more” is what Kagge writes about, where the combined forces of honor, beauty, pain, fraud, illusions, greed and nationalism are stronger than anywhere else — even to this day, as 2,7 million years’ worth of pack ice is melting. So much of what has been written about the North Pole has not been based on reality, but on illusions. More than 2,000 years ago, people in Egypt, India, Iran, China tried to imagine the climate, the people, the topography of the top of the world. Eventually, most people have imagined what the North Pole might be like — and until about a century ago, they where mostly wrong. Countless people have lost their lives to hypothermia, starvation, hunger and scurvy, trying to reach the Pole themselves. Erling Kagge knows what it costs — he has walked there himself. Those who are not Polar explorers, might wonder why the history of the North Pole should matter. There are three reasons: The History of the North Pole is an account of who we are. The North Pole is a barometer of sorts, measuring our values — and those of our forefathers. Furthermore, The North Pole points ahead to what awaits the rest of the planet.