A visual portrait of a year in Utqiaġvik, Alaska, where time fractures between polar night and midnight sun.
Live demoUtqiaġvik, Alaska, is one of the few places on Earth where the sun disappears entirely for months, and then stays above the horizon for months more. This piece uses Utqiaġvik as a way into a different kind of calendar — one structured not by weeks or months, but by light.
Daylight data was pulled from the Open-Meteo API for the full year 2024 at Utqiaġvik’s coordinates. Polar night was defined as 0 daylight hours; midnight sun as 24 hours; twilight seasons as everything between.
Each day was assigned a color based on its daylight hours, running from near-black navy through graduated slate blues to pale sage-green.
Seen as a whole, the year fractures into seasons of color: a long, gradual descent into darkness in autumn, the sudden snap of polar night, and the slow bloom back toward light. A minimal marker highlights the current day, a small anchor making the abstract concrete.
