It's no wonder that during the Christmas season Santa Claus wants to leave home and travel around a bit. In December, the North Pole has to be one of the most inhospitable places on Earth.

For starters, it's three months into the six-month darkness that reigns from the fall equinox in September until the spring equinox in March. Just a few days before Christmas, at the winter solstice, the sun never even peeps above the horizon, making that particular day one long night.

It's also cold — as in totally frozen. Because there's no land at the North Pole, Santa had to build his workshop on ice. The polar ice pack is a jumbled mass that cracks, jams, melts a bit, and refreezes, creating a surface that's difficult to navigate.

But at least Santa doesn't have to worry about falling through. When the first submarine, the U.S.S. Nautilus, traveled under the polar ice pack to reach the North Pole by water, it measured thicknesses of up to fifty feet.

In addition to being dark and cold, what Santa called the North Pole yesterday might not be the North Pole tomorrow. That's because the polar ice pack floats, moving with the currents of the Arctic Ocean.

So Santa has to keep relocating his workshop to be sure he's where he's supposed to be — at the geographic North Pole, the point where the Earth's axis would emerge if it were a metal rod as our familiar globes imply.

Furthermore, if Santa gets lost, he can't use a compass to find his way home. A compass would point him to the magnetic North Pole, which is different from the geographic North Pole. Magnetic north is not a fixed point but a shifting region that's currently about a thousand miles from where Santa wants to be.

If Santa ever became totally disoriented in the darkness on his floating ice pack, with a shifting magnetic pole trying to lure him off in the wrong direction, the best thing for him to do is probably what he already does at the end of his Christmas travels: point his trusty reindeer directly toward the North Star and count on them to find their way home.

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