North America Human habitation in the North American polar region goes back at least 17,000–50,000 years, during the
Wisconsin glaciation. Falling
sea levels allowed people to move across the
Bering land bridge that joined
Siberia to northwestern North America (Alaska), leading to the
Settlement of the Americas.
Early Paleo-Eskimo groups included the
Pre-Dorset (); the
Saqqaq culture of Greenland (2500–800 BC); the
Independence I and
Independence II cultures of northeastern Canada and
Greenland ( and ); and the
Groswater of
Labrador and
Nunavik. The
Dorset culture spread across Arctic North America between 500 BC and AD 1500. The Dorset were the last major
Paleo-Eskimo culture in the Arctic before the migration east from present-day
Alaska of the
Thule people, ancestors of the modern
Inuit. The Thule Tradition lasted from about 200 BC to AD 1600, arising around the Bering Strait and later encompassing almost the entire Arctic region of North America. The Thule people were the ancestors of the Inuit, who now live in
Alaska,
Northwest Territories,
Nunavut, Nunavik (northern Quebec), Labrador and Greenland.
Europe For much of
European history, the north
polar regions remained largely unexplored and their geography conjectural.
Pytheas of
Massilia recorded an account of a journey northward in 325 BC, to a land he called "
Eschate Thule", where the Sun only set for three hours each day and the water was replaced by a congealed substance "on which one can neither walk nor sail". He was probably describing loose sea ice known today as "
growlers" or "bergy bits"; his "Thule" was probably
Norway, though the
Faroe Islands or
Shetland have also been suggested. 's 1780s map of the Arctic features a "Northern Ocean". Due to the limited information available at the time, early
cartographers were unsure how to represent the regions around the North Pole, with some including regions of land (as in
Johannes Ruysch's map of 1507, or
Gerardus Mercator's map of 1595) or representing the entire region as water (as with
Martin Waldseemüller's world map of 1507). The few expeditions to penetrate much beyond the
Arctic Circle in that era added only small islands, such as
Novaya Zemlya (11th century) and
Spitzbergen (1596). From the late 16th to the early 20th century, expeditions to the Arctic Ocean became more common (see
List of Arctic expeditions), often in search of trade routes from Europe to the
Pacific Ocean, and so the geographical knowledge of the region gradually improved. , the
Northern Sea Route within it, and the
Northwest Passage via Canadian Inland Waters.
19th century The lack of knowledge of what lay north of the shifting barrier of ice gave rise to a number of conjectures. In England and other European nations, the
myth of an "
Open Polar Sea" was persistent.
John Barrow, longtime Second Secretary of the
British Admiralty,
promoted exploration of the region from 1818 to 1845 in search of this. In the United States in the 1850s and 1860s, the explorers
Elisha Kane and
Isaac Israel Hayes both claimed to have seen part of this elusive body of water. Even quite late in the century, the eminent authority
Matthew Fontaine Maury included a description of the Open Polar Sea in his textbook
The Physical Geography of the Sea (1883). Nevertheless, as all the explorers who travelled closer and closer to the pole reported, the
polar ice cap is quite thick and persists year-round, and the open polar sea theory was widely considered to be disproven by the early 1900s.
Fridtjof Nansen was the first to make a
nautical crossing of the Arctic Ocean, in the
Fram Expedition from 1893 to 1896.
20th century The first surface crossing of the ocean was led by
Wally Herbert in 1969, in a
dog sled expedition from Alaska to
Svalbard, with air support. The first nautical transit of the north pole was made in 1958 by the submarine
USS Nautilus, and the first surface nautical transit occurred in 1977 by the
icebreaker NS Arktika. Since 1937,
Soviet and Russian manned
drifting ice stations have extensively monitored the Arctic Ocean. Scientific settlements were established on the drift ice and carried thousands of kilometres by
ice floes. In
World War II, the European region of the Arctic Ocean was
heavily contested: the
Allied commitment to resupply the Soviet Union via its northern ports was opposed by German naval and air forces. In 1954
Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) established the first commercial flights over the Arctic Ocean, between
Los Angeles and
Copenhagen.
21st century In August 2019, US President Donald Trump suggested buying Greenland. He raised the idea firmly in December 2024, saying
ownership of Greenland was necessary for the national security and economic interests of the United States. He has said the use of force is not ruled out. In a December 10, 2024, social media post, President-elect Trump referred to the prime minister of Canada as the governor of a purported 51st state. Previously he had said that annexation of Canada might be preferable from a trade point of view. On February 1, 2025, he began a trade war. During a telephone call with new Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on March 28, 2025, Trump raised the idea of Canada becoming the 51st U.S. state and described his view of the advantages of
annexation. In various other comments, formal and informal, he has expressed a desire to control Canada's resources and the
Canadian Internal Waters of the Arctic, commonly known as the Northwest Passage. == Geography ==