I've read few articles about US and Soviet Union competing about North Pole. North Pole race like the space race. Soviet Union had a base established 1961 called Novolazarevskaya. The most famous thing that happened there is when Leonid Rogozov doctor had to perform a self surgery to remove his appendix. But I'm just curious what were scientists doing there in the first place? Why was the race to the north pole so important?
There were (and are) lots of "strategic" reasons to want to lay claim to, and have knowledge of, the North Pole.
One is basic geopolitics. When one looks at a map of the global Cold War, one often sees something like this — basically a horizontal projection of some sort. But strategic maps from the time looked more often like this — a top-down, polar view. Because that is how a full-scale conflict would be fought between the USA and USSR, "over the pole," which is much more direct than "over the oceans." Now, in practice, these things could be more complicated, both because not all conflict was on this intercontinental level (e.g., a lot of Cold War maps are just about Europe or Asia), and there are other ways to structure your attacks (e.g., submarines can be anywhere, and even bombers can come from other bases or use refueling to take longer routes).
But you can see the pole is a pretty important area just strategically, because it's the "no man's land" in between these nations. So both US and Soviet ballistic missile submarines, for example, were adapted to break through polar ice to fire their missiles, which in turn means that the hunter-killer submarines trying to find them would need to know where they might be hiding up there, which in turns means that the missile subs would need to know where and how to hide, which in turn (phew) means that you'd want to have a really good understanding of what those spaces were like, physically. Modern submarine warfare requires not only have a good map of the bottom of the ocean, but when you are under ice, you want to know about how much ice and so on is above you, and you also need to know how different temperatures of water are circulating (because those are super important to using, and evading, sonar). So that is automatically going to translate into a lot of technical interest in the polar setup (as it did to ocean research in general in the Cold War). So in 1947, the US military began researching ice thickness in the North Pole, and by the end of the decade they were also researching sea ice, permafrost, properties of snow, etc. — all things you'd want to know about an inhospitable battlefield. And that's not getting into some of the weird research, like whether whales or dolphins could be used as part of submarine warfare under the poles, which the US did.
As Michael Dennis puts it so well:
The cold-war American state saw the Arctic a s a potential battle space; consequently, there was a massive investment by the armed services in understanding and mapping the region, whether undersea, on the ice and land, or in the air and space above the pole. To the extent that the polar regions mattered in the cold-war public imagination, they existed as potential sites of conflict, in addition to being exotic and nearly unimaginable sites of adventure. The polar perspective figured most prominently in the symbol of the United Nations, a view of the globe from high atop the North Pole.
Yet another reason is the sort of prestige-race that was being played out in the Cold War as well. Space, the oceans, the poles — these were all seen as places where "firsts" mattered, in that they showed allied and domestic audiences which side was worth "betting" on. So just as satellites were part of the International Geophysical Year of 1957-1958, so was polar research — it was meant to be a new "frontier" that would inspire the world about new scientific and exploratory progress, unite distant groups of researchers in many countries, and overall create an atmosphere of "global science" that (it was hoped) would foster new ties, connections, good-will, and so on.
And yet another, mundane reason is that the North Pole contains many important strategic resources, like oil. That is one of the reasons it is still a hotly-contested area today.
There is much more that could be said, but you can see, I hope, that the North Pole in particular played sort of a triple role in the interests of the US and the Soviet Union. And by the late Cold War, it added a new importance: it, along with Antarctica, became key sites for studying the changing climate.
There is quite a large literature now in the history of Cold War science on polar research, both in the 19th century and in the present. One nice collection of essays on both, and the intersections between the two (which is where I got Dennis' quote), is Roger Launius, James Fleming, and David Devorkin, eds., Globalizing Polar Science: Reconsidering the International Polar and Geophysical Years (Palgrave, 2010). For an article-length discussion of the Cold War as a potential battleground, and how that drove scientific priorities in the Cold War, see Ronald Doel, "Constituting the Postwar Earth Sciences: The Military's Influence on the Environmental Sciences in the USA after 1945," Social Studies of Science 33, no. 5 (2003): 635–666, which is where some of the details of the research come from.
