The Land of the Midnight Sun

For nearly four months each year, it never gets dark in Fairbanks. At night, the sun dips low, but just when it seems like it’s about to disappear beyond the horizon, it climbs right back up into the sky. 

The reason the sun never quite sets has to do with Fairbanks’ location. Fairbanks’ location is close to the Arctic Circle. Every 24 hours, Earth makes one full rotation on its axis. The side of Earth that faces the sun experiences daylight, while the side facing away from it experiences darkness. 

But Earth isn’t perfectly upright. It’s tilted. Summer occurs in Alaska when the Northern Hemisphere is angled toward the sun. During this time, the closer you get to the Arctic Circle, the more sunlight you receive, because the sun shines down on this area continuously. 

The opposite is true in the winter months, when the Arctic Circle tilts away from the sun, so in Fairbanks and other places in the Northern Hemisphere, daytime is very short; in some areas, the sun never rises at all, resulting in a months-long period of darkness called a polar night.

In Fairbanks, people celebrate the midnight sun with an annual festival, complete with a baseball game that starts around 10 p.m. Tourists flock to Fairbanks to experience the endless summer days, but the nonstop daylight doesn’t seem all that remarkable to residents. 

“We’re used to it,” says Brennan, 15. He and his friend Lily, also 15, have lived in Fairbanks their entire lives. “Light or dark, day or night, we do our normal things,” says Lily.

And sometimes normal means a baseball game at 10 p.m.

^{This article was originally published in the May 2023 issue.}