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Informationen zum Autor Megan Stine has written several books for young readers, including Where Is the White House? , What Was the Age of the Dinosaurs? , Where Is the Congo? , Who Is Michelle Obama? , and Who Was Sally Ride? She lives in Clinton, Connecticut. Klappentext "It might seem lonely at the top of the world, but the North Pole is teeming with life! Polar bears, walruses, and Arctic seals make their home on sea ice that can be nine feet thick, while the Inuit and other Indigenous peoples continue their traditions and means for survival in this harsh climate. Along with the early twentieth-century story of Robert Peary's egomaniacal quest to reach the exact spot of the North Pole, this is an exciting new addition to the Where is? series"-- Leseprobe Where Is the North Pole? Robert E. Peary had wanted one thing in life—fame. He was born in Pennsylvania in 1856. Since childhood, he had dreamed about reaching the North Pole. In the late 1890s, most of the world had already been explored by Europeans and Americans. But no one had ever reached the North Pole—not on foot or by boat. Not even the Indigenous people who lived in the Arctic had ever dared to go that far north. No one knew what the North Pole would be like if they ever reached it. Was it land? Was it ice? Was it water? Many people thought there was a so-called Open Polar Sea, with nothing but water at the top of the globe. Other people thought Greenland—a huge island country in the Arctic—might reach all the way to the North Pole. Maybe they could find it by just walking north. Robert Peary knew that finding the North Pole would make him famous. But he had no idea how hard it would be. He would have to travel to the northwestern shores of Greenland by ship and be dropped there to camp for a long, dark winter. With no way to get home for a whole year, he would have to learn how to survive in the Arctic cold. He would have to hunt and kill seals, polar bears, and musk oxen—or starve if he couldn’t find any. He would have to learn how to drive a pack of nearly wild dogs pulling long sleds loaded with supplies. He would have to walk for hundreds of miles across the ice, in blinding snowstorms. Sometimes the temperatures would drop to fifty degrees below zero. It would get so cold that Peary’s dogs’ feet and tails would freeze into the snow. The ice would have to be chopped away to free the dogs. In the brutal cold, Peary’s own toes would become so frostbitten, they would snap and break off?! From then on, he could only shuffle as he walked. When food was gone, he would get so hungry that he’d eat his own dogs to survive! Peary didn’t know any of this when he first set sail to find the North Pole in 1891. He also didn’t know that one man who came along on the trip would become his biggest rival—seeking to reach the North Pole on his own. Would either man ever reach the pole and return alive? And what terrible things would one of them do to achieve the fame he had craved? Chapter 1: The Arctic Circle The North Pole is a single point at the “top” of the earth. It is the point farthest north on the globe. (The South Pole is the single point at the “bottom” of the earth.) The North Pole is also at the exact center of what is called the Arctic Circle—a huge area of ice and water. Look at a world map or a globe and you will see horizontal lines drawn on it. The line that goes around the very middle of the earth, like a belt, is called the equator. The Arctic Circle is marked by the line near the top of the globe and includes the whole frozen area around the North Pole. The distance from the most southern points of the Arctic Circle to the North Pole is about 1,600 miles. The Arctic Circle is huge—over five and a half million square miles in area. That’s ...
