The northernmost town in the US, Utqiagvik, Alaska is about to enter months of darkness!
As per The Wall Street Journal, the town of Utqiagvik, previously known as Barrow, located along Alaska’s North Slope on the Arctic Ocean, lies at 71.17 degrees North latitude, around 330 miles north of the Arctic Circle.
As a result, for approximately two months each year, the sun stays below the horizon which results in an extended “polar night.”
In the town of nearly 5,000 people, the sun set at 1:27 pm local time on Monday and won’t rise again until January 22, 2025.
On that day, it will rise at 1:15 pm in the south and set just 48 minutes late and afterwards the days will begin to lengthen quickly.
Until then, the sky may take on shades of azure or violet during astronomical and civil twilight, but daylight will not go beyond dusk.
In Utqiagvik, a quarter of the days experience temperatures that stay below zero degrees, and temperatures rise above freezing just 37 percent of the time.
Due to Earth’s tilt on its axis, regions within the Arctic Circle can stay turned away from the sun for days, weeks or even months between the fall and spring equinoxes.
The prolonged darkness also helps to create the stratospheric polar vortex, a whirlpool of cold, sinking air over the North Pole that affects weather patterns in the northern hemisphere.
