Utqiagvik: Life in the Midnight Sun and the Polar Night
Imagine you lived in a place where the sun doesn’t set for two and a half months, what would you do with all the daylight? Would you spend time soaking in the sun? Go fishing? Now imagine living in a place where the sun doesn’t rise for two and a half months. Would you go insane from the darkness? What could you do outdoors with no daylight? Did you know that the further North and South one gets, the more drastic their summer and winter daylight hours are? If you lived on the equator, you would see almost exactly 12 hours of daylight everyday, year round. Utqiagvik is the most northern town in Alaska, and even in all of North America. Utqiagvik isn’t the northernmost town in the world, that title is reserved for Svalbard’s Longyearbyen. However, Utquiagvik is only 1300 miles away from the North Pole. If there was a road, you could drive to the North Pole in under a day. Utqiagvik faces this climate every year. In the summer, the sun is above the horizon for two and a ha...