TROMSØ: The City That Lives Without the Sun | 4K

It is 1.30 p.m. on a December afternoon. It is the middle of the afternoon and it has been dark for six hours. It will stay dark for another 10. Not because of clouds, not because of a storm, because the sun does not rise here in November, or in December, or in January. And yet, below those stars, in that deep arctic dark, a city of 77,000 people is living its life, fully, completely, without waiting for the sun. Concerts are being performed. Restaurants are full. Children are at school. Scientists are at work. Fishermen are at sea. A city doing what in the longest night in the world. This is Tromsø, the largest city above the Arctic Circle, called, by those who love it, the Paris of the North. Not because of its architecture, because of what it does with the dark. Stay with us, because what Tromsø has learned about living inside the night is something the rest of the world has spent centuries trying to figure out. Here is the first thing that Tromsø's darkness produced that no one predicted. Scientists. Thousands of them. From every country that has an interest in what the Arctic is doing, which, as the planet warms at twice the rate here as anywhere else on Earth, is increasingly every country. The University of Tromsø, UIT, the Arctic University of Norway, is the northernmost university in the world. Founded in 1968, it now has 16,000 students and research programs that are among the most consequential in the world. Arctic medicine, marine biology, glaciology, atmospheric physics, and aurora research, the science of the northern lights, which has been conducted in Tromsø continuously since 1829. The Tromsø Geophysical Observatory has been watching the aurora since 1829. That is 195 years of continuous observation. Every significant aurora event in recorded history has a data point here. Every solar storm, every geomagnetic disturbance, every night the sky turned green or red or white over the Norwegian Arctic. This observatory exists in Tromsø for the same reason everything important about the aurora exists here, because Tromsø sits directly under the auroral oval, the ring around the magnetic pole, where the lights are most frequent, most intense, most scientifically accessible. The darkness that makes ordinary life more difficult is the same darkness that makes the aurora visible. The same condition that drives people indoors also drives the science that is trying to understand the relationship between the sun and the earth's magnetic field, a relationship that affects every satellite, every communication system, every GPS device on the planet. What happens in the sky over Tromsø in January is not local news, it is planetary physics. Here is what Tromsø did with 49 days of darkness. It filled them, not with resignation, not with endurance, with intention. Tromsø has more bars and restaurants per capita than any other city in Norway. In January, when the polar night is at its deepest, the city does not quiet down, it intensifies. The Tromsø International Film Festival, one of the world's northernmost film festivals, is held every year in January, on purpose, in the darkest weeks of the year. The logic is deliberate. If the dark is coming regardless, fill it with something worth doing. Fill it with film, with music, with the particular warmth that comes from people gathering in the same warm room while something large and cold presses against the windows. The Arctic Cathedral, Isavskatedralen, sits on the eastern shore of Tromsøysund, visible from nearly everywhere in the city. Its design is deliberate symbolism. Eleven triangular aluminum panels arranged to suggest an iceberg or a glacier or a breaking wave, depending on who you ask. Completed in 1965, it is one of the most recognized buildings in Norway. And in January, when the polar night is at its absolute darkest, the cathedral glows from within. The largest stained glass window in Europe, a mosaic of light in a dark facade, faces north, toward the darkness, toward the aurora, as if the building itself is having a conversation with the Arctic night. This is what Tromsø does with the dark. It answers it, not by hiding from it, not by pretending it is not there. By putting something bright and warm and human-made directly into the center of it, and the dark, unchanged, absolute, makes that brightness more beautiful than it would be anywhere else. Before there was a city here, there were people here. The Sami, the indigenous people of northern Scandinavia, have lived in and around what is now Tromsø for thousands of years. Their territory, Sapmi, stretches across the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Kola Peninsula of Russia. It is one of the largest indigenous territories in Europe. And in the mountains above Tromsø, the Sami reindeer herders still follow a pattern of life that has not changed in its fundamentals for a thousand years. In winter, the herds come down from the high plateau to the coastal areas where the snow is softer and the reindeer can dig through it to the lichen beneath. The herders follow them on snowmobiles now, not skis, with GPS trackers on the lead animals, with satellite weather forecasts on their phones, and with the knowledge built over generations passed from parent to child in the doing rather than the telling of how the reindeer think, where they will go when the storm comes, which valleys shelter, and which funnel the wind, which snow is edible, and which will kill the animals that try to eat it. The Sami have nine words for different types of snow, not because they are poetic or because their language is unusual, because nine different types of snow have nine different consequences for a reindeer herd trying to survive the winter. Tjoaldmemurta, snow with an icy crust that the reindeer cannot break through, a crust caused by a January thaw followed by a hard freeze. One of the most dangerous conditions a herder can face because the animals can starve on top of a full pantry they cannot open. This word exists because the thing it describes has killed herds. The language is a survival manual. On a clear winter night in Tromsø, the aurora does not appear gradually. It arrives. One moment, the sky is stars. The next, a green arc has appeared in the north, thin and precise as a brushstroke from horizon to horizon, and then it begins to move. The physics of the aurora is the physics of the sun and the earth. Charged particles from the solar wind follow the earth's magnetic field lines toward the poles, where the field is strongest and the particles are funneled into the upper atmosphere. There they collide with oxygen and nitrogen, exciting the atoms, releasing photons. Green from oxygen at 60 miles up, red from oxygen at 150 miles up, blue and purple from nitrogen. The physics is clear, the experience is not. There is a phenomenon that the researchers at the Tromsø Geophysical Observatory have spent 195 years trying to predict. The substorm. A sudden, explosive brightening of the aurora, when the curtains of light accelerate, pulse, fold over themselves, when the colors shift from green to violet to red in seconds, when the whole sky seems to breathe. Substorms last between 30 and 60 minutes. They can happen at any time during an active aurora display. And when they happen, everyone who is outside looking up stops talking. Not because they have been told to, because there is nothing to say that the sky is not already saying. People who have watched the aurora in many places around the world consistently say the same thing about Tromsø. The displays here are different. Not because the physics is different, the aurora obeys the same laws everywhere on Earth. But because Tromsø sits at the exact center of the auroral oval. The place where the magnetic field lines are most concentrated. The place where the particles arrive with the most energy. The place where the displays are most frequent, most dynamic, most full. There are places on Earth that are famous for the aurora. And then there is Tromsø, which is where the aurora lives. And now the question asked at the beginning of this journey begins to answer itself. What has Tromsø learned about living inside the night? This. That the night is not empty. That what the darkness takes away with one hand, it offers back with the other. It takes the sun. It gives the stars. It takes the warmth. It gives the aurora. It takes the easy days. It gives the community that forms around people who have decided to stay in a difficult place. And it gives the knowledge earned through 49 dark days and 195 years of watching the sky. That nothing beautiful is ever given for free. The rest of the world has recently discovered something that Tromsø has known for a long time. That the relationship between light and human well-being is more complex than it appears. That the solution to darkness is not always more light. Sometimes the solution is community. Sometimes it is purpose. Sometimes it is the deliberate creation of warmth inside the cold. The koslig of the Norwegian winter. The conviction that what is outside the window does not determine what is possible inside. The research done in Tromsø on the psychology of the polar night has found something counterintuitive. People who are born here, or who have lived here long enough, do not experience the myrkertid the way newcomers do. They do not dread it. Many of them, not all, but many, describe it as their favorite season. The season of aurora. The season of koslig. The season of deep winter skies and the particular silence of a city that has gone inward and found that what is inward is enough. The researchers call this wintertime mindset. The deliberate reframing of a difficult season as a different season. Not a worse one. Not the absence of summer, but the presence of winter. With everything winter has. The aurora. The silence. The stars. The extraordinary warmth of a room. With people in it. And cold outside. And something beautiful in the sky. 77,000 people. 69 degrees north. 49 days without the sun. The darkness does not ask permission. And neither does the light that comes to answer it. So, could you live in 49 days of darkness? Or would the aurora be worth it? Tell us in the comments. We read every single one. And if this changed the way you think about winter. About what darkness can hold. About what a city can become when it decides to stop waiting for the sun. Share it with someone who needs to see something that changes their mind tonight. Next week, we are taking you to a place where the cold is not the story. The story is what the cold built. What it preserved. And what it is slowly, now, beginning to release. Subscribe so you don't miss it. Until then, remember. The most extraordinary lives are rarely the most comfortable ones.