North Pole-1 (russian: Северный полюс-1) was the world's first Soviet manned drifting station in the

Arctic Ocean The Arctic Ocean is the smallest and shallowest of the world's five major oceans. It spans an area of approximately and is known as the coldest of all the oceans. The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) recognizes it as an ocean, a ...

, primarily used for research. North Pole-1 was established on 21 May 1937 and officially opened on 6 June, some from the

North Pole The North Pole, also known as the Geographic North Pole or Terrestrial North Pole, is the point in the Northern Hemisphere where the Earth's axis of rotation meets its surface. It is called the True North Pole to distinguish from the Ma ...

by the expedition into the high latitudes Sever-1, led by

Otto Schmidt Otto Yulyevich Shmidt, be, Ота Юльевіч Шміт, Ota Juljevič Šmit (born Otto Friedrich Julius Schmidt; – 7 September 1956), better known as Otto Schmidt, was a Soviet scientist, mathematician, astronomer, geophysicist, statesm ...

. The expedition had been airlifted by aviation units under the command of Mark Shevelev. "NP-1" operated for 9 months, during which the ice floe travelled . The commander of the station was Ivan Papanin. On 19 February 1938 the Soviet ice breakers '' Taimyr'' and '' Murman'' took four polar explorers off the station close to the eastern coast of

Greenland Greenland ( kl, Kalaallit Nunaat, ; da, Grønland, ) is an island country in North America that is part of the Kingdom of Denmark. It is located between the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Greenland ...

. They arrived in

Leningrad Saint Petersburg ( rus, links=no, Санкт-Петербург, a=Ru-Sankt Peterburg Leningrad Petrograd Piter.ogg, r=Sankt-Peterburg, p=ˈsankt pʲɪtʲɪrˈburk), formerly known as Petrograd (1914–1924) and later Leningrad (1924–1991), i ...

on 15 March on board the icebreaker '' Yermak''. The expedition members, hydrobiologist Pyotr Shirshov, geophysicist Yevgeny Fyodorov, radioman Ernst Krenkel, and the commander Ivan Papanin, were awarded the

Hero of the Soviet Union The title Hero of the Soviet Union (russian: Герой Советского Союза, translit=Geroy Sovietskogo Soyuza) was the highest distinction in the Soviet Union, awarded together with the Order of Lenin personally or collectively for ...

title.

References

Exploration of the Arctic Polar exploration by Russia and the Soviet Union 1937 in the Soviet Union Arctic research Arctic expeditions 1937 in science 20th century in the Arctic Expeditions from the Soviet Union North Pole {{Soviet-stub