What Life Looks Like When Night Lasts for Days | Hacker News Reader

What Life Looks Like When Night Lasts for Days

nytimes.com

105 points_lbaq35 comments

Growing up in central Michigan, followed by career years mostly in the mid Atlantic, I see both sides to immersion in white winter and its short days.

In the north, Winter is an opportunity to shift gears, don different threads, and turn your attention to cold, footing, visibility, and gloom.

But there's also skating on prepared rinks and for miles along snow covered frozen rivers, hiking and cross country skiing through thick stands of snow covered pines in dead silence at 15F, and cold play in a wealth of activities that exist only where cold and ice can pile up and last for months. And then you return home, slip into toasty togs, and warm yourself from within with a host of drinks that can't fully be enjoyed any other way.

Winter does have a certain magic to it.

It does. But after growing up in freezing winter Russia, then cold rain Holland and now living in California, even though I do miss some of those wintery things, I’m sure glad to be back to no season coastal California every time I spend even a few days in a cold/dark northern hemisphere place.

Hey, we definitely have seasons here - like now it's "raining once a week and sorta cold in the morning" season. Summer is very different ;-)

I love my short visits to the snow cap at china peak but the heck with living in that mess.

Note that even central Michigan is south of much of Europe. Today Lansing has the same day length as Rome, a full hour extra daylight today compared with Berlin, and two hours more than Oslo.

I don't like the short days in Denmark, but I'd dislike them less if there was the opportunity for hiking etc in the snow.

I was thinking something like this. I moved from Indiana to Trondheim, Norway 4.5 years back (Oslo is a 45ish minute flight south). Sometimes I'd just love to have a nice, "long" michigan winter day.

What's the backstory on moving from Indiana to Norway?

It's a love story. Met some dude playing a text-based MMORPG some years back, and things developed from there.

The weak expert consensus is now that the largest contributor to near-sightedness is reduced exposure to sunlight as a young child which causes the eyes to grow slightly differently. Do places above the Arctic circle have higher rates of near-sightedness?

EDIT: apparently there is a correlation, but it seems to me it's not as strong as the sunlight theory would have suggested.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1395-3907.2003....

Perhaps there's correlation between sunlight exposure and being out in "large spaces" where the majority of what you're seeing is farther away than your homes' walls. Having developing eyes focus on a mountain panorama or distant trees across a lake leads to different stresses on the eyeball ... or perhaps some different training for physiological systems that deal with focus.

> Perhaps there's correlation between sunlight exposure and being out in "large spaces" where the majority of what you're seeing is farther away than your homes' walls.

This was one of the other leading hypotheses for a long time. More recent data came down pretty decidedly on UV light rather than focal range. See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16248851

I can't understand how sunlight exposure could be more of a problem than excessive close-range work (reading books, etc.) during formative years.

That is a misconception and has been debunked (same goes for reading in dim light), I been a kid like that and I basically spend all day since the last 15y in front of a computer and I have near perfect eye sight. The "screen time" is not at fault per se if you get enough outside time. The reason is not just any "sunlight exposure" but it is about UV radiation that is important for the development of the eye.

The linked study doesn't agree that "that is a misconception and has been debunked". It says it's true:

> As indicated by other reports, myopia was found to be associated with ... education and nearwork.

The above linked study is from 14 years ago. (I linked it because it addressed arctic communities.) It's the more recent work has mostly ruled out the near-work explanation.

> ...for many years there was an assumption that long hours of study indoors, staring closely at books (near work) and never focusing on distant objects, led to myopia. This study belied that error.

http://sunlightinstitute.org/research-shows-sun-exposure-red...

> ...increased load of near work was not significantly associated with odds of myopia when factors including parental myopia, demographics, and outdoor activities were adjusted for.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3930282/

wrong conclusion...it is because those people are not doing this outside ;) so yes if you sit all day at home and read books it won't be good but the reason is not the reading distance. I remember as a kid my parents always said "don't sit so close to the TV"...same story there

Biology doesn't have to make sense, and a lot of it doesn't. There are weirder correlations in there.

Just a note, that with polar night comes a) long winter with sun and snow, and b) polar day.

Further, polar night in Tromsø ends around 21st of January, while the midnight sun starts around 21st of May - that's roughly 17 weeks going from the sun not rising, to the sun not setting - more than an hour of difference, week to week on average (0-24 hours, in 17 weeks).

[ed: of course, the change isn't linear: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/norway/tromso ]

At least in my opinion the best part about living north of the Arctic circle is the months where it don't get dark

Funny how people are different; my experience is the exact opposite - summers are tolerable once you've got yourself a decent set of blinds. Just.

Winters? Love it.

The polar night is eerily beautiful; much of it isn't pitch black, but rather blue-ish, thanks to refraction in the atmosphere - we get lots and lots of twilight hours!

Also, there is something soothing (to this guy, anyway) about the relative quiet outside - snow mutes much noise, birds don't chirp as much, most people spend more time indoors...

Summer? Well, at times it is convenient to have, say, a barbecue at two AM while working on your tan - but mostly I've found the midnight sun to be an annoyance more than a bonus.

(Full disclosure - I am not born and raised in the Arctic, I just sort of stumbled into a couple of summers and winter seasons in various places up north (from 68 to 79 degrees latitude); the locals are overwhelmingly in favour of summer!)

I have heard from others who move here that they have problems with sleeping. For me, who have grown up here, it is normal and not a problem.

Winters are cold, but except for that it is nice to see the difference in light from day to day this time of year

As a student I would often walk home in the middle if the night, bright as day.

Pretty weird when taking summer holidays in southern Europe, and it gets dark like 8 or so in the evening.

That's interesting. Moving from Southern Europe to Northern Europe that was one of the worst things for me. I simply could not get any sleep. One would think that they would have nice blackout curtains but in fact the curtains let all the light in, making sleeping impossible.

>making sleeping impossible

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Good-Night-Eye-Shade-GNES/dp/B009V0...

These do the trick pretty well. Considering the cost could you not install them?

http://www.ikea.com/ie/en/products/textiles-rugs/curtains-bl...

I don't mind the change in light (dark or light) - but a friend recommended sticking alum foil over windows with normal house/floor cleaning soap for glue (doesn't hurt the glass, makes for easy removal). Worked for me when I worked night shift and went to bed around 10 am.

I used to have a bedroom with four windows and no blinds in Stockholm. It worked, but after five years I put in some blinds.

I just put a shirt over my eyes

You need proper blackout curtains where the fabric is in direct contact with the framing of the window. Typically curtains have a lot of space between the fabric and the frame/glass so you'll get a lot of light coming in.

I think the changing light overall is the best part - both the midnight sun and the blue light during polar night.

There are ofcourse a number of pictures - but one place to start for the curious is this group with (mostly) amateur photos from Troms in Norway:

https://m.facebook.com/groups/349495561863890/

I've recently moved back to Tromsø - and the light is still just as fascinating.

In Finland, it's party time :)

I grew up in Alaska, though not far enough north that night never ended. Still, when you go to a mostly windowless school (yay 70s brutalist architecture), you arrive in the dark and leave in the dark. I'd get a peek at the sun sometimes but effectively I'd only see the sun on weekends.

Both the winters and summers were surreal, the days bled into one another. I don't miss it at all, though I wouldn't mind going back home for a week in the middle of winter just for the memory jog.

I haven't spent any time in the Arctic Circle but it's been an itch I want to scratch. The last 10 years I've been based at about 19° S but I went and spent half a year in 46° S. Arriving in summer, my brain kept thinking it was 4PM all the way to 9PM :-) Short winter days would race by. I found myself thinking 'day over already?!' a lot. The advantage was you were always discussing the dawn beauty with neighbours as everyone saw it.

Speaking of endless night, an idea that has always intrigued me is the prospect of some rogue planets [0] out there, that don't get any light from a star but may still support life through their own geothermal activity and other chemical processes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_planet

Reply on news.ycombinator.com