People who love the arctic for its beauty, not its riches, look enviously at Antarctica, which was carefully parcelled out by a treaty regime designed to stop the cold war spreading south.
The southern part of the particle cloud, or solar wind, grazed Earth's magnetic field on the 14th and 15th, resulting in a particularly good night for aurorae.
We didn't encounter any polar bears on the rest of our trip, but later, safely back on the cruise ship, I did manage to see my first Ursus maritimus in the wild.
They would ski for 10 to 11 hours a day and finally at 4:15 am Indian time my husband called me on satellite telephone to announce the team had reached their destination on the North Pole.