Showing posts with label Arctic Circle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Arctic Circle. Show all posts

February 27 – International Polar Bear Day

Posted on February 27, 2017


Things are not looking up for polar bears!

These popular white bears normally live within the Arctic Circle, in the northern polar region. (Penguins, not polar bears, live in the southern polar region.)

Because of global climate change, sea ice in the Arctic is breaking up and melting earlier and earlier every year, and that means that the polar bears have way fewer opportunities to hunt and feed. 

Not eating means poorer health.

And poorer health means fewer babies.

Other current threats to polar bears include oil exploration, which disturbs the ecosystem and can cause pollution. Actually, toxic pollution anywhere in the world can threaten polar bears, because pollutants tend to get into water, get carried into and all over in the ocean, and get absorbed into tissues of living things. If each fish eats a little bit of a toxic chemical, and each ringed seal eat a whole bunch of fish, and a polar bear eats a WHOLE bunch of ringed seals...then the polar bear ends up eating an awful lot of that toxic chemical!

So...polar bear populations are going down, and the species is considered "vulnerable" (not yet endangered, thank goodness!).

Still, Polar Bears International wants you to know that there IS hope. Check out the gorgeous website to learn more about these wonderful creatures, the dangers they face, and the ways in which people are trying to help.

By the way, some people wonder why we should help polar bears when there are children in the world who are hungry or shoeless. That seems like a pretty good point, BUT fighting global climate change saves us all -- the bears AND the children in the world! Large carnivores are some of the strongest creatures in any ecosystem, but they are also some of the most vulnerable; we have to watch them carefully for signs that something is going wrong with a particular habitat.





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January 27 – Soldag in Norway

Posted on January 27, 2014


In some places in northern Norway, the sun hasn't come up for weeks! Today, perhaps, it shone again on a village somewhere for the first time since the beginning of December. And in that village, today will be declared a “Soldag”!

Soldag means “Sun Day.” Never mind that it's Monday! Declaring a Sun Day is like declaring a Snow Day—school is cancelled for the day, many people skip work, and people enjoy the natural beauty of—in this case—sunshine!

All through late January and early February, the sun is making its first appearance in weeks, and people are celebrating its comeback. Aside from taking a day off of school and work, a masked ball is held at night. A “prince of the sun” is chosen to preside over the ball, and when the sun comes up, everyone removes their masks and light fireworks!

(Those of us who live in often-sunny places are always waiting and waiting for the dark in order to shoot off fireworks, so it seems funny to light fireworks when the sun comes up. But it's a celebration!


The Arctic Circle

Did you know that any land that lies between the Arctic Circle and the pole has this sort of perpetual night in the winter and perpetual day in the summer? This is because of the tilt of the Earth as it orbits around the sun.

In the Northern Hemisphere's wintertime, the entire hemisphere is tilted away from the sun, so the days get shorter and shorter until the shortest day of the year, December 21 or 22. Places that lie north of the Arctic Circle have shorter and shorter days until the sun disappears altogether for days or weeks or maybe even months!

As I mentioned, the flip side of having no sun at all for weeks is having 24 hours of sun in the summer. These polar regions are often called “land of the midnight sun” because for days or weeks the sun never sets!

To learn more, check out the diagrams here or the video here. 

Sometimes the Norwegian skies are lit,
not by the sun, but by the aurora borealis.
  • In some places, there is some light even during the “Polar Night,” when the sun never rises, because the sun is just below the horizon. It's a kind of twilight day! But in other places, farther north, it stays much darker. In those places, the moon can become a very, very bright light in the sky! Check out this great compilation of time-lapse photography during the almost-four-month-long night at Ny-Alesund, an island that is ruled by Norway. 

  • This video has a lot of misspellings and other errors—I suspect that whoever made it isn't a native English-language speaker. But it shows a more twilight sort of Polar Night, as well as the midnight sun. 


Also on this date:


 Thomas Crapper Day 







Vietnam Peace Day 























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