A few years ago, we posted about the RMS Warrimoo, which is remembered, as the story goes, for crossing the intersection of the international dateline and the equator at precisely the turn of the century from 1899 to 1900. In doing so, the ship was said to be in two different days, two different months, two different seasons, two different years, and also in two different centuries-all at the same time. There may even be some truth to the sea story. Click here to read more.

While the story of the RMS Warrimoo was a once in a century event,  Katie Weeman, writing in the Scientific American Observations blog, discusses a well-known spot in the ocean where time itself becomes almost meaningless. Likewise, even the concept of direction gets fuzzy, at best. She is referring, of course, to the North Pole.

For most of us, the earth itself is a great Newtonian clock, spinning on its axis while orbiting a medium-sized star. A year is a full orbit, while a day is a rotation, with hours, minutes, and seconds subdivided for our convenience,

We divide the globe into 24 time zones and sailors not relying on GPS can calculate both latitude and longitude by the angular height and time of the sun at its zenith at noon. 

None of this really applies at the North Pole. Weeman notes that “at the North Pole, 24 time zones collide at a single point, rendering them meaningless. It’s simultaneously all of Earth’s time zones and none of them. There are no boundaries of any kind in this abyss, in part because there is no land and no people. The sun rises and sets just once per year, so “time of day” is irrelevant as well.”

When she wrote her thoughts on the timelessness of the North Pole, Katie Weeman was working as communications support for the icebreaking research vessel Polarstern, which she describes as “deliberately locked in ice for a year to measure all aspects of that ice, the ocean beneath it and the sky above.”  

While Weeman considers the meaning, or lack thereof, of time in the high Arctic, it is worth noting that even direction, the ability to chart a course, at the North Pole is limited. At the North Pole, there are only three primary directions — up, down, and South. East, West, and North are simply missing until you travel some distance away. Even South hardly counts as a unique direction because it is indeed any direction not directly up or down.

Of course, time is more than the movement of a minor planet in one of a myriad of solar systems. Scientists now define time by the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium-133 atom.  And according to Einstien’s theory of relativity, time doesn’t exist independently but is part of spacetime, a single four-dimensional manifold.  

For most sailors, the ancient celestial clock is good enough, except perhaps in the high Arctic. 

Weeman writes that at the North Pole, it’s all ocean, visited only rarely by an occasional research vessel or a lonely supply ship that strayed from the Northwest Passage. Sea captains choose their own time in the central Arctic. They may maintain the time zones of bordering countries—or they may switch based on ship activities.

Turning from science and navigation to a children’s fairy tale, it seems fitting that Santa Claus’s workshop is said to be at the North Pole. If one is to place Santa anywhere, it should be timeless. Unlike the timelessness of the pole, however, this legend dates back to only the 1860s, when Harper’s Weekly published a drawing by the cartoonist Thomas Nash that identified Santa’s residence as “Santa Claussville, North Pole.“