As it enters polar night, this Alaska town won’t see sunrise for 64 days

The nation’s northernmost town – Utqiagvik, Alaska – is about to descend into months of darkness. Think of it this way: By the time the sun rises again, a new president will occupy the White House.

The town of Utqiagvik, formerly known as Barrow, has a population just shy of 5,000 people. It is situated along Alaska’s North Slope on the Arctic Ocean and sits at 71.17 degrees North latitude – some 330 miles north of the Arctic Circle. That means that, for about two months every year, the sun stays below the horizon, leading to a prolonged “polar night.”

The sun will set at 1:27 p.m. local time on Monday, and it won’t reemerge from its long slumber until Jan. 22, 2025. That’s when the sun will rise at 1:15 p.m. in the south, and set just 48 minutes later. The days grow longer rapidly after that.

Until then, the sky might take on shades of azure or violet, part of astronomical and civil twilight, but daylight won’t progress beyond dusk.

The months of darkness contribute to a brutal, unforgiving climate.

One quarter of all days in Utqiagvik don’t go above zero degrees, and temperatures breach freezing only 37 percent of the time. The darkness also fosters the development of the stratospheric polar vortex, a whirlpool of cold, sinking air over the North Pole that influences the northern hemisphere’s weather.

On the winter solstice, which falls at 5:02 a.m. Eastern time Dec. 21, the sun will still be 4.7 degrees below the horizon at noon.

Because of Earth’s tilt on its axis, regions in the Arctic Circle can remain facing away from the sun for days, weeks or even months at a time between the fall and spring equinoxes. The effect is greater as one gets closest to the poles.

At the North and South poles, there is only one sunrise and one sunset per year. The sun rises on the spring equinox, and sets on the fall equinox. At the North Pole, that means daylight between March and September. During the fall and winter, darkness lasts six months; the only light stems from stars, the moon and the emerald flicker of the aurora borealis.

Surprisingly, all locations on Earth see the same duration of sunlight every year, give or take a bit because of mountains, valleys and other topographical features. Utqiagvik sees about the same number of hours of sunlight as Miami, Sydney and Moscow; it all balances out. On the equator, every day is approximately 12 hours long, with seasonal fluctuations magnified the farther one heads poleward.

The difference?

The angle of that sunlight, and thus the intensity. Sunlight at high latitude locations shines from a low angle in the sky. That means the same amount of light is spread over a much greater area, and isn’t as strong. That means it doesn’t have much of a heating effect.

Utqiagvik picks up its sunshine in the summertime, when brightness reigns 24 hours a day in the “land of the midnight sun.” Utqiagvik, for examples, will enjoy endless daylight between May 11- Aug. 19, 2025.