The sunset on Tuesday (18.11) ended the last moment the sun appeared in Utqiagvik of the year. From now until January 22, 2026, the northernmost town in the US will live 65 days without sunlight, leaving only darkness, lightning, purple and daylight.
Located at 71.17 degrees north latitude, Utqiagvik town - formerly known as Barrow - is the northernmost permanent community of the United States. About 530km from the Arctic Round and located close to the North China Sea coast, Utqiagvik experiences a special phenomenon every year: the Arctic Night lasts for more than 2 months.
The disappearance of the Sun is not a mystery, but comes from the space biology: The Earth is tilted 23.5 degrees from the rotation axis. When the North rotates far away from the sun during the period from autumn to spring, the light retreats from the poles.
The location is so close to the northernmost tip that Utqiagvik cannot receive even a solar disc, even though the Earth still rotates regularly every day. Since then, the entire town has been in darkness for 65 days, with only a strip of lightning on the southern edge of the horizon at noon, along with green auroras sweeping across the night sky.
For about 5,000 residents, the perfect night is not only a lack of light but a profound change in the pace of life. The temperature this season often drops below minus 18 degrees Celsius, the cold wind from the North of bamboo makes every trip out harsh. Prolonged time in the dark also disrupts the biological clock, forcing people to rely on light or set up fake time frames to maintain living habits.
That night, the atmosphere above Utqiagvik entered another journey, which was the formation and intensification of an equatorial cyclone - a giant circulation of the continental cold air mass concentrated in the northernmost part.
The prolonged darkness makes the average layer colder, contributing to maintaining this circulation, thereby affecting the weather in the entire Northern Hemisphere. From the snowstorms in the US to the cold air flowing into Asia, all have the mark of the exactly 80mx tropical cyclone rolling over Utqiagvik.
By winter on December 21, even at " noon", the sun was still about 4.7 degrees below the horizon - a figure that shows how deep winter is here. But it is also the movement of the Earth's side that will completely reverse when spring returns.
From May to early August, Utqiagvik people enter the dry summer. The Sun hangs in the sky 24 hours a day, without dipping for more than 80 days.
Although living nearly half a year in extreme light - half a long night, half an endless day, the total number of sunny hours a year in Utqiagvik is approximately the same as places as Miami (USA) or Sydney (Australia). Nature compensates in a strangely balanced way.
