Member-only story
The One Minute Geographer: This Fragile Earth (8) What’s Up at the North Pole?
We can learn a lot of interesting things by looking at a polar projection — one that has the North or South Pole at the center of the map. In this type of projection, distortion is least around the Pole and greatest at the outer perimeter — close to the Equator.
One of the first things to note is that the shortest distance between the USA and Russia is directly over the polar region. During the Cold War, if missiles were ever to be fired between the two nations, most of them would come over the Pole. In the late 1950s the US built a string of radar stations across northern Canada, Alaska and Greenland called the DEW Line, for Distant Early Warning. By 1990 most had been dismantled because now satellites perform that monitoring function.
