"Svalbardrein pho" by I, Perhols. Licensed under CC BY 2.5 via Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Svalbardrein_pho.jpg#/media/File:Svalbardrein_pho.jpg
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Like many of you, I'm a little concerned about Santa Claus these days.
Although the exact location of his residence is a closely-guarded secret, like his age, we know it is somewhere in the vicinity of the North Pole. As the Arctic ice cap continues to melt with increasing global temperatures, wherever he lives up there, it is possible that his house and workshop could one day crash through the thinning ice and vanish beneath the sea.
That would certainly disappoint a lot of well-behaved children.
I'm hoping though that he had sense enough to build his house on land rather than on the ever shifting and drifting sea ice found around the actual North Pole. In fact, I'm pretty sure that's what he did, based on the evidence of his reindeer.
You may recall from Clement Moore's famous 1823 poem that Santa drove a miniature sleigh drawn by "eight tiny reindeer." The makes me think that he may live somewhere on Svalbard, an island archipelago about halfway between Norway and the North Pole.
Reindeer -- we call them caribou in North America -- are the second largest deer species on earth. The only larger species is the moose. That is, the only larger species is the one we North Americans call a moose. The English call them elk. What we call elk, of course, the British call something else - red deer to be exact. We can thank early British colonists, not the most accomplished naturalists, for such terminological confusion about our animals. We should be glad that they didn't confuse mouse with moose.
Getting back to reindeer, an average male, called a bull, weighs as much as 400 pounds, a typical female or doe weighs about half that.
Maybe these "miniature reindeer" were all female. Reindeer are the only species of deer in which both sexes have antlers, so to a casual observer an all-doe team might have looked like a group of miniatures. Besides eight females wouldn't be so likely to squabble over who gets to lead the team.
On the other hand, even eight 200 pound reindeer plus Santa plus his sleigh with all the presents - that's several tons at least - landing on your roof could be problematic, which is why I favor the Svalbard idea.
Reindeer on the Svalbard islands - like animals on many islands -- are dwarfs. They weigh only about half as much as reindeer on the mainland. So maybe Santa's hideaway is on Svalbard where melting sea ice would not send his house and workshop to the bottom of the ocean. Eight 100-pound does plus Santa plus his sleigh with all the presents might still seem problematic in the roof-landing department, but compared to teaching reindeer to fly without wings while towing a heavy sleigh, it must be a cinch.
The other problem Santa is no doubt confronting is pressure to install a Global Positioning System, or GPS, in his sleigh. As we all know that a GPS is a satellite-based navigation system designed to destroy any sense of direction you may have previously had.
Santa apparently managed to find all the children before there was a GPS, even after his route expanded a few centuries ago from Europe to include North America. In all that time, I've never heard reports of him stopping to ask for directions.
As a self-respecting old school male, I'm certain in fact that he wouldn't stop to ask directions no matter how temporarily confused he might be. For those without any sense of direction, GPS may be a necessary crutch. However, for those of us like Santa who are perfectly capable of finding our own way no matter how long it takes, relying on a GPS is only slightly less emasculating than asking for directions. Let's hope that Santa continues to resist the dreaded GPS-assisted delivery and rely on his own instincts.
He owes it to the other males on the planet.
Steven Austad is Chair of the Biology Department at UAB. Before becoming a research scientist, he had various lives as an English major, a newspaper reporter, a New York City taxi driver, and a Hollywood wild animal trainer. Living now in Birmingham with his veterinarian wife, 6 dogs, 2 parrots, and a cat, he enjoys nothing more than communicating how science works to the general public.