The Aurora and the Dark

In Fairbanks, the sun rises late on the winter solstice morning and sets in the early afternoon. About three hours and forty-one minutes of daylight, with the sun barely clearing the horizon before it begins to go back down. The cold that accompanies this darkness can reach sixty degrees below zero Fahrenheit without wind chill. At those temperatures, exposed skin freezes in minutes. Moisture in exhaled breath freezes as it leaves the body. Trees crack in the night.

And in that darkness, if the solar wind is right, the sky performs.

The aurora borealis is caused by charged particles from the sun interacting with gases in the upper atmosphere. Fairbanks sits under the auroral oval, the ring around the Earth's magnetic pole where the phenomenon is most consistently visible. On a clear night, from roughly late August through April, a visitor who stays at least three nights under clear skies is very likely to see it in Fairbanks. It moves. It pulses. It has been described as a curtain, a wave, a fire, and a river of light depending on its shape and the observer's frame of reference.

The Iñupiat have names for different forms of the aurora, and oral traditions about its meaning that vary by community. Some traditions held that the lights were the spirits of the dead playing games. Others treated particular configurations as weather signs. These interpretations were not uniform across the Arctic; they reflected the diversity of communities spread across thousands of miles of northern coast.

The aurora has no practical function. It generates no warmth. It illuminates nothing on the ground. It exists at a scale that makes the human viewer feel, for a few minutes, appropriately small.

Alaska has a lot of sky. In the dark half of the year, the sky uses all of it.