In most places, winter feels dark enough: you go to work in the half-light and come home in the dark, wondering when you last saw a proper blue sky. In one small Arctic city, though, the sun has already vanished completely. On 18 November, the people of Utqiagvik, Alaska, watched their final sunset of 2025. They will not see the sun rise again until late January 2026. For the next 64 days, the northernmost settlement in the United States will live without true daylight. No glowing horizon at midday. No sun breaking above the sea. Just a band of bluish twilight for a few hours, and then darkness again.
Where the sun disappears for months
Utqiagvik, formerly known as Barrow, sits on Alaska’s North Slope, about 500 miles northwest of Fairbanks, close to the Arctic Ocean. Around 4,400–5,000 people live there, along with archaeological sites that date back to around 500 CE, according to the city’s own records. At about 1.30pm on 18 November, the sun dipped below the horizon for the last time this calendar year. Residents will not see it come back up until around 22–26 January 2026, when the first fragile sunrise returns at about 1.23pm local time. That doesn’t mean two months of pitch black. During the heart of Polar Night, Utqiagvik still gets a daily spell of civil twilight – that pale, steel-blue light you normally see just before dawn or just after sunset. It is bright enough to make out the snow, the sea ice and the shape of buildings, but the sun itself never clears the horizon.
The science behind Polar Night
The phenomenon sounds dramatic, but the reason is simple physics. Earth is tilted about 23.5 degrees on its axis. That tilt is what gives us seasons. In winter, the Northern Hemisphere leans away from the Sun; in summer, it leans towards it. For locations far enough north – within roughly 23.5 degrees of the North Pole – there comes a period each winter when the Sun’s path never climbs high enough to appear above the horizon at all. Utqiagvik, at around 71.17°N, sits well inside the Arctic Circle. As the December solstice approaches, the town is angled so far away from the Sun that Earth itself blocks the light. The result is Polar Night: day after day when the Sun remains permanently below the horizon. The reverse happens in summer. For nearly three months, Utqiagvik experiences the “midnight sun” – 24 hours of daylight, with the Sun circling low in the sky but never setting. A quarter of all days in the town never rise above 0°C, and sea temperatures only climb above freezing about a third of the time, even with constant summer light.
Darkness, temperature and the polar vortex
When the Sun disappears, so does daytime heating. Air over the Arctic cools sharply during Polar Night, especially high up in the atmosphere. That cooling is one of the ingredients that helps form the polar vortex – a pool of very cold, low-pressure air spinning over the North Pole in the stratosphere. Most of the time, that frigid air stays locked in place over the Arctic. But when the vortex is disrupted, tongues of that cold air can spill southwards, bringing brutal winter outbreaks to parts of Europe and North America. So while Utqiagvik’s darkness feels intensely local, it is tied into a much larger pattern that influences winters thousands of miles away.
What it’s like to live without the sun
To outsiders, the idea of spending more than 60 days without a sunrise sounds like a psychological endurance test. Online, reactions veer between horror and curiosity. One Reddit user noted that Utqiagvik “gets like 80 days of midnight sun, ending around August, only for the sun to say bye-bye from November to January,” adding they couldn’t imagine how much that would “screw with your system”, even though they were morbidly curious to try it. But people who actually live in Alaska often describe a different reality. One resident commented that it isn’t the darkness that bothers them most, but the constant summer light: they find it hard to sleep when the sun never sets, and it is easy to lose track of time and end up doing yard work at 11pm without noticing. Winter, by contrast, feels “dark and cosy”; they said they sleep best in the depths of the season, happily staying in bed until nine or ten at weekends and still waking up before dawn. None of this means the darkness is easy for everyone. Seasonal depression, disrupted sleep and social isolation can all be challenges. But in Utqiagvik, Polar Night is not a strange experiment, it is part of the yearly rhythm. Schools still run. Shops still open. Life carries on, just in a different light, or lack of it.
Life in a sunless season, and the return of light
Utqiagvik is more than its extreme daylight cycle. It is home to Iñupiat communities whose traditions and subsistence practices have adapted to Arctic conditions for centuries. Daily life continues through the darkness, school, hunting, fishing, community gatherings and even high school American football at Barrow High School, often described as the northernmost team in the country.With the Sun gone, artificial lights, house windows and the aurora borealis transform the town’s visual world. For some residents, the long night brings not gloom, but calm, a quieter pace and deeper sleep than during the bright, sleepless summer months.After about 64 days, the horizon finally brightens. In late January 2026, the Sun will rise again, briefly and low, around 1.23pm local time. That first thin sunlight marks not just the end of Polar Night, but the turning of the year. Until then, the town will live in a world of twilight and darkness that most of us only glimpse for a few hours a day. For Utqiagvik, it is simply winter.
