On September 12, 2024, an icebreaker sailing from Alaska to Svalbard reached a point in the Arctic Ocean about 1,008 kilometers from the nearest land. The coordinates were 85 degrees 48 minutes north and 176 degrees 9 minutes east. Ponant, the operator of Le Commandant Charcot, reported that the ship was the first to reach the Northern Pole of Inaccessibility. Three days later, it reached the geographic North Pole. The two stops were roughly 470 kilometers apart. The farther-north stop was considerably closer to land.
The Northern Pole of Inaccessibility answers a particular question. Where in the Arctic Ocean is the distance to the nearest land as large as possible? An answer has to account for islands as well as continental coastlines. A small island can rule out a candidate point even when the nearest mainland is much farther away. In this case, researchers identified three shores at roughly the same distance from the pole. One is on Ellesmere Island in Canada. The other two are on the Russian islands of Komsomolets and Henrietta.
One way to see the problem is to imagine expanding a circle around a point in the ocean until it first touches shore. The radius at that instant is the distance to the nearest land. Try again at another point and the circle might get larger. At the Northern Pole of Inaccessibility, moving the center away from one of the three nearest shores means moving toward another. The best position depends on how faithfully the coastline data represent the edges of all three islands. The circle also has to be measured over Earth’s curved surface, which matters in a region where lines of longitude rapidly converge.
For years, references put the point at 84 degrees 3 minutes north and 174 degrees 51 minutes west. Polar explorer Jim McNeill encountered conflicting coordinates while planning an expedition. In a paper published online in 2013, Gareth Rees, Robert Headland, Ted Scambos and Terry Haran placed the pole more than 200 kilometers from that widely cited position. The corrected point was farther north and on the east side of the 180th meridian. Both longitudes are close to that meridian, so a large apparent change in the written longitude translates into a much smaller angular change on the globe.
Geographer Richard Barnes later calculated the position independently using two coastline datasets. One result was about 180 meters from the rounded coordinates published by Rees and colleagues. The other was about 1.2 kilometers away. Both placed the pole in the same part of the central Arctic basin, about a thousand kilometers from land. The difference matters if someone expects a GPS waypoint to identify a single spot to within meters. The shoreline model determines where the calculation puts the center, and the model can change when the underlying mapping improves.
For a ship’s crew, reaching the published position means working through sea ice that can be rearranged by wind and currents. Ponant describes the vessel as having a Polar Class 2 hull, built to navigate in severe ice conditions. The operator’s account of the 2024 voyage places twenty scientists aboard. The route gave them a chance to collect data far offshore while the bridge crew navigated the ice. From there, the ship continued through the Arctic toward Spitsbergen. The voyage tied a point derived from maps and equations to a dated arrival that the operator could report.
The same ship returned in September 2025 with explorer Chris Brown aboard. He wanted to cover the last stretch on foot if the ice allowed it. Brown wrote that the ship stopped about 1.5 kilometers from the waypoint, alongside firm ice that the crew expected to drift toward it overnight. By morning, according to his account, the ship was about 7.5 kilometers away. The crew moved closer again, but cracks in the ice made it too dangerous to walk all the way to the target.
Once the group was back aboard, the ship sailed through the waypoint. Brown reported that his handheld GPS put him within seven meters of the published coordinates. That reading describes how close the receiver got to the chosen point. The independent calculations give some context for what seven meters means here. Even if the receiver reports a position to the nearest meter, two sound coastline models can put the mathematical pole more than a kilometer apart. Brown’s account gives a record of the approach to a specific waypoint and of how the changing ice affected the attempt.
The pin for this Locory uses the rounded east longitude from the original Arctic calculation. On a polar map, it sits deep in the basin, away from both the geographic pole and the nearest islands. The three photos show the icebreaker during an earlier Arctic operation, a lead in the Beaufort Sea ice, and two Coast Guard crew members photographing the pack from another vessel. At the waypoint itself, the only way to recognize the spot from the deck is to check a position reading. The surface around the hull can look different by the next crossing, as it did even over the course of one night in Brown’s account.
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