Today, the city of Utqiaġvik, Alaska, will go into almost complete darkness. The Sun is set only to rise on this Arctic Circle town on January 23 of 2021.
The northernmost American town, formerly known as Barrow, will experience a cycle of 65 days of the Polar Nights, a natural phenomenon of near-darkness 24 hours a day.
What are polar nights?
Polar nights happen within the polar circles when the Sun’s disc is not visible above the horizon line.
The opposite phenomenon, the Midnight Sun, of 24 hours daylight, occurs during the northern hemisphere. It runs from mid-spring through summer, from mid-May through early August, when the Sun doesn’t set for more than two months north of the Arctic Circle.
About the beginning of Polar Nights in Utqiaġvik, a Climatologist and Alaska resident, Brian Breetscheneider shared on Twitter that ”When the sun rises on January 23, it’ll be a brand new world”.
Image Credit: Mark Lester / Alaska Dispatch News
