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This ice floe is actually at the North Pole!

Cook

The claim of Cook is far fetched and highly contested.

Peary: Was he the first at the North Pole?

Peary's claim to have reached the North Pole has always been subject to doubt, for a number of reasons. The party that accompanied Peary on the final stage of the journey included no one who was trained in navigation and could independently confirm his own navigational work, which some have controversially claimed to be particularly sloppy as he approached the pole. The distances and speeds Peary claimed to have achieved border on the incredible, almost three times that which he had accomplished up to that point.

^{Image courtesy of Wikipedia}Robert Peary

Peary's account of a direct straightline journey to the pole and back - the only thing that might have allowed him to travel at such a speed - is contradicted by his assistant, Henson, whose account speaks of tortured detours to avoid pressure ridges and open leads. Still, in 2005, British explorer Tom Avery completed his trek to the pole in 36 days, 22 hours and 11 minutes using 16 dogs and pulling two sledges which were replicas of those used by Peary, showing that Peary’s prowess was not impossible.

Photogrammetric rectification has been used to examine Peary’s pictures and determine from the angle of shadows at what latitude the photos were taken. This technique can produce the angle of the elevation of the sun from the shadows in pictures. This angle can be compared with the sun angle calculated from the Nautical Almanac to confirm a specific location and time. One book declares that this technique proves that Peary never reached the Pole. Another report by the National Geographic Society concluded that he was no more than five miles away from the pole.

Amundsen

The first undisputed sighting of the pole was in 1926 by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, who also was the first person to reach the geographical South Pole. He was with his American sponsor Lincoln Ellsworth from the airship Norge, designed and piloted by the Italian Umberto Nobile, in a flight from Svalbard to Alaska.

Other visits to the North Pole

• On May 3, 1952 U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Joseph O. Fletcher and Lieutenant William P. Benedict landed a plane at the geographic North Pole. Flying with them was scientist Albert P. Crary.
• Russian pilots flew to and landed at the pole in the late 1940s.
• The United States navy submarine USS Nautilus (SSN-571) crossed the North Pole on August 3, 1958, and on March 17, 1959, the USS Skate (SSN-578) surfaced at the pole, becoming the first naval vessel to reach it.
• Ralph Plaisted made the first confirmed surface conquest of the North Pole on April 19, 1968. Using snowmobiles as the primary means of transportation, he arrived exactly at the North Pole in a total elapsed time of 43 days, 2 hours and 30 minutes.
• The Soviet nuclear-powered icebreaker Arktika completed the first surface vessel journey to the pole on August 17, 1977.