•    American explorer Robert Edwin Peary (1856-1920) is credited for being the first person to reach the North Pole on April 7, 1909.

•    He was a civil engineer who had worked for the navy before going on his Arctic quests.

•    In a series of expeditions starting in 1886, Robert Peary made attempts to reach the North Pole.

•    On his seventh expedition, Peary and his party set out from the north coast of Grant Land with sledges in March 1906 and after several weeks they managed to reach as far as 175 miles from the North Pole. They had to return without accomplishing their goal due to exhaustion and lack of enough supplies.

•    In July 1908, better equipped and accompanied by a party of 24 men, 19 sledges and 133 dogs, which included well-trained Eskimos, Peary started northward from Cape Columbia. On April 6, 1909, Peary, his assistant Mathew Henson and four Eskimos reached 90°N, or the North Pole.

•    Peary stayed there for 30 hours to make the calculations to prove he is at the Pole.

•    There is no land beneath the North Pole but floating Arctic ice sheet that expands during colder months and shrinks to half its size in the summer.

•    And did you know that there are two North Poles? Well. The first is the North Magnetic Pole, a magnetic phenomenon which changes daily depending on changes under the Earth’s crust. Then there is a North Terrestrial Pole, a fixed point on top the Earth used for reference in maps. It is the second one that we generally mean  when we say the North Pole.

-- Compiled by Aamnah Arshad