North Pole-1
North Pole-1 ( Russian Северный Полюс-1, Severny Poljus-1, abbreviated: СП-1, SP-1) was the first polar station established by the Soviet Union in 1937 on a drifting ice floe at the North Pole . Since neither Robert Peary nor Frederick Cook probably reached the North Pole, this was the first time humans entered the area at the northernmost point on earth.
Procedure and results
The ice drift station "North Pole-1" was headed by Iwan Papanin and also included the scientists Evgeni Konstantinowitsch Fjodorow (1910-1981) and Pyotr Petrovich Schirschow (1905-1953) as well as the radio operator Ernst Krenkel . Otto Schmidt was responsible for the entire project . On May 21, 1937 , an ANT-6 dropped the expedition on an ice floe. After an initial, preliminary position determination, it was 20 kilometers from the pole; later the position was specified to 89 ° 25 'north and 78 ° 40' west. On May 27 and June 5, three more aircraft landed, at times there were 43 men on the ice; six tents were set up and ten tons of cargo were unloaded. On June 7th, the planes took off again, leaving the four expedition members and a dog behind; the floe had already drifted to 88 ° 54 ′ north and 20 ° west. In July 1937 the occupation formed the northernmost party and Komsomol group in the Soviet Union, although only Papanin was a full party member and Schirschow was even non-party.
At the start of the expedition, the ice floe was 3200 by 1600 meters and three meters thick. The station consisted of a tent, a radio station and a weather house. In July the weather became so warm that pools of water formed everywhere. On the other hand, snowstorms kept blowing the station. For the first transpolar flight from Moscow to Vancouver on June 20, 1937 under Valery Chkalov , the expedition created an emergency landing site. Winter set in on September 2nd with a temperature of minus twelve degrees. This enabled the expedition participants to build a house out of ice bricks (igloo) in addition to the tent. The last time they saw the sun was on October 4th.
In mid-October they had already crossed the 85th parallel. The ice floe drifted south along the east coast of Greenland at a speed of up to 21 kilometers per day . Despite the onset of the polar night , the drift speed of the ice field tended to increase. From the beginning of January the ice was pressed and on January 20, 1938, the inhabitants of the clods felt a strong bump: the distance from the tent to the edge of the ice was only 300 meters. After a heavy snow storm, the first crevice ran through the expedition camp on January 29th. Further cracks in the ice forced people to constantly move, while the surrounding ice field turned into ruins. On February 3 ran Taimyr in Murmansk in to salvage the expedition, four days later, the Murman - never had to the season icebreaker as far north in the Arctic surgery. The floe wasn't even big enough to fully stretch the 70-meter-long antenna wire, and it had drifted so far south that the sun even appeared again. On February 12, the researchers sighted the Taimyr's headlights , but it wasn't until a week later that the icebreaker reached camp at 70 ° 54 'north and 19 ° 48' west within sight of the Greenland coast. In 274 days "North Pole-1" had covered 2500 kilometers, the direct distance was 2050 kilometers; at last the ice floe was only 30 meters wide. Expedition leader Iwan Papanin had lost from 90 to 60 kilograms during that time. The semi-rigid airship USSR-W6 was also supposed to fly from the Kola Peninsula towards Greenland to take up the expedition. However, it failed. Thirteen crew members died.
The rich scientific results include the first depth measurements from the northern Arctic Ocean . On June 6th, a sea depth of 4290 meters was measured and a soil sample was taken from the sea floor. On July 17th, a water depth of 4,395 meters was measured; on September 13th only 3767 meters: an underwater mountain ridge had been discovered. According to the findings of "North Pole 1", the Arctic Ocean presented itself as a deep depression. For the first time, a depth profile from the pole to the Atlantic could be sketched.
The movement of the ice floe itself gave a picture of the surface current. It accelerated when crossing into the Atlantic. In a water depth of just 100 meters, Pyotr Schirschow also discovered a current in the opposite direction towards the Pole. The force of gravity was also measured at two points along the drift, with which information about the geological structure could be obtained. The values obtained for magnetic declination were also helpful , because only with their help can the magnetic compass be used for navigation in these areas. The meteorologists had until then been convinced that the North Pole was always covered by a cap of cold air; it was occasionally warmer on the ice floe than in Moscow.
Already on June 3, 1937 an alcohol was sighted. Later, the expedition members also observed snow bunting , fulmars and a bearded seal . On August 1, a female polar bear with two cubs turned up and was shot away.
The Second World War initially prevented further, similar undertakings. In April 1950, the Soviet Union put a second ice drift research station into operation. Between 1937 and 1991 there were a total of 31 Soviet ice drift stations in the Arctic.
Movie
- Red arctic. The conquest of the North Pole 1937 , documentation, Germany, 2009
literature
- Ernst Krenkel: My callsign is RAEM . New life, Berlin 1977.
- Iwan Papanin: Life on an Ice Floe . A diary. SWA, Berlin 1947 (reissued under the title Drift on the Ice Floe , Leipzig 1970).
- Ivan Papanin: Ice and Flame . Memories. Dietz, Berlin 1981.
- Yevgeny Fyodorov: From my polar diaries . Brockhaus, Leipzig 1986.
- Aleksej W. Turchin and Nikolaj A. Kornilow: Drift: Russian ice drift stations in the Arctic . In: Arctic - Antarctic . Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany, Bonn 1997, p. 36-42 .
- Siegfried Czapka: Arctic. Discoveries - expeditions - events . 3, 1933 to 1945. Ingeborg Trögel, Leverkusen 1998.
- Iwan T. Spirin: The Conquest of the North Pole . F. A. Brockhaus, Leipzig 1955 (Russian: Покорение Северного Полюса . Translated by Alexander Böltz).
- Ulrich Unger: Landing at the North Pole . In: Wolfgang Sellenthin (Ed.): Fliegerkalender der DDR 1985 . Military Publishing House of the GDR, Berlin 1984, p. 125-138 .
