Everything in the atlas

The 1845 Franklin Expedition went looking for the Northwest Passage through Canada's Arctic, and CBC News says close to 130 sailors died. Inuit accounts, recorded by John Rae in 1854 and later by Charles Francis Hall, describe what became of some of the men.

A freshwater lake under about 4 km of ice beneath Russia's Vostok Station in central East Antarctica, first detected by airborne radio-echo survey in 1974-75 and confirmed by satellite in 1993. A 2013 report of a new bacterium in its water was later put down to contamination.

A United States Navy operation of 1946-47 to set up Little America IV, a research base in Antarctica. A story that Colin Summerhayes and Peter Beeching call a myth recast it as an Allied attack on a secret German base, Base 211, in Queen Maud Land.

In Greenlandic tradition, a qivittoq is a person who turned away from the community to live alone in the mountains, and who was thought to gain sharpened senses and supernatural abilities. The idea is known from 18th-century West Greenland.

In 1916 Ernest Shackleton, Tom Crean and Frank Worsley crossed the mountains of South Georgia on foot, and Shackleton later wrote that he often sensed a fourth man with the three of them. T. S. Eliot's use of the idea in The Waste Land gave the third man factor its name.

A legend of a ship found drifting west of Greenland with its whole crew frozen dead below deck. Frank M. Schuster, writing in Polar Record in 2022, links it to an unnamed-ship story printed by the New York Gazette in 1828 under the headline Awful Discovery.

In Greenlandic tradition, a tupilaq was a figure its owner made in secret to cause harm. No real one has ever been found in Greenland; the carved tupilaq figures made in large numbers since 1905 are representations.