Sun has set in Barrow and will only rise again in 2020

Posted on 22 November 2019

The most northerly town in the USA, hundreds of kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, experienced its last sunrise and subsequent sunset of the year on Monday,18 November.

Utqiagvik (formerly known as Barrow), in Alaska, is a town of about 4,300 residents who will only experience the next dawn on 23 January 2020. That’s 67 days of complete darkness.


Kirsten Alburg, a school teacher in the town, posted a photo of the year’s last sunset on Facebook with the following caption, ‘Photo of our last sunset today. The kids and I watched it from our classroom window. It was beautiful!’

She got her class to draw pictures of the Polar Night and she explained to the children why they experience two months of darkness during their winter.

‘When the polar region tilts away from the sun during the winter, even areas that are on the Earth’s day side do not receive any direct sunlight as the sun stays below the horizon,’ is how timeanddate.com explains the occurrence, however Ms Alburg had the opportunity to explain it to her class in a more practical manner.

Image: Kirsten Alburg/Facebook






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