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Joe Blanton, director of our Research Correspondence staff, oversees the answering of 50,000 queries and comments addressed to the National Geographic Society annually. Each week he posts answers to three of the most interesting inquiries received online at Glad You asked. Unfortunately, individual e-mail replies are impossible.

Santa Standard Time?

What time is it at the North Pole?

If you’re standing precisely at the North Pole, you can take a step into any of the 24 time zones, which converge right there at the Pole. Some contend that North Pole time equals Greenwich (England) time. Others maintain that it’s whatever time whoever’s there wants it to be. So if you’re leading an expedition from, say, New York City, it’s U.S. eastern time, if that’s what you want. After all, when you’re standing at the top of the world, you’re “King of the Hill.”

Personal sense of time doesn’t really go away when you go to the Pole. For instance, when a U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker went there a few years ago, it met up with a Russian ship. The two crews were on completely different schedules, 12 hours apart. Even though the ships were right next to each other, one crew was sleeping when the other was awake.

Brochures for a lake in Michigan claim that NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC magazine rated it as one of the world’s six most beautiful lakes. Has NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC in fact rated lakes?

You’d be surprised how many times this type of question comes up. Once while on vacation, my family and I pulled into a scenic overlook in the mountains. An official sign there proclaimed that NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC had deemed that particular view as one of the ten most beautiful in the United States. It was indeed a spectacular vista, but whose criteria made it better than any number of others? No, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC has not rated lakes or views as to beauty or towns as to climate. Beauty is, as they say, in the eye of the beholder.

What’s the difference between a gulf and a bay?

Well, the difference is fuzzy enough to make one wonder why we don’t just pick one word in English for these geographical features and toss the other one out. But then there would doubtless be factions opposing the “Bay” of Mexico or “Gulf” of Biscay. And besides, there is a bit of a difference. Although bays and gulfs are both bodies of water partially surrounded by land, a bay is generally smaller than a gulf. (But not always. The Persian Gulf, for example, is much smaller than Canada’s Hudson Bay.) And while gulfs are parts of oceans or seas that extend into the land, bays can be parts of lakes or other inland bodies of water. Many bays have calm waters and are free from strong currents, making them good natural harbors.