Fossil Camp at 78° North: The Midnight Sun and a Missing Moon

Video Calls From the Fossil Camp

1Every Friday this year, Ms. Corinne Abernathy's eighth grade class, at a school at 35° north latitude, joins a video call with a geology field team on an Arctic island at 78° north. The team, led by Dr. Halldora Nwosu, collects fossil leaves, tree stumps and sea shells from the island's cliffs. They can only work on the slopes from late May to August, when most of the snow has melted. Eighth grader Mateus Fairweather keeps a log that compares the camp's sky with the school's sky, using a sky app. Table 1 shows part of his log.

2On the June calls, the team said the Sun never set. It moved around the sky all day, lowest in the north around midnight and highest in the south at noon. Even so, the camp was cold. The air was often near 4 °C, and patches of snow still lay on the hills. In December the team flew back for one week to check their weather station. For that whole week the Sun never came up, and only a dim blue glow showed around noon.

3To make sense of the log, Ms. Abernathy set up a model. A lamp in the middle of the room stood for the Sun. Mateus carried a globe around the lamp, keeping its tilted axis pointed toward the same corner of the ceiling the whole way, the way Earth's axis keeps pointing toward the North Star. A sticker marked the camp at 78° N and another marked the school at 35° N. At the spot where the north end of the axis leaned toward the lamp, Mateus turned the globe once, and the camp sticker stayed in the light the whole time. Halfway around the lamp, where the north end leaned away, the camp sticker stayed in the dark the whole turn.

4Dr. Nwosu told the class that in all her summers at the camp she has never seen a full moon. In December it is the other way around: the full moon circles the sky all day and all night, bright enough to walk by. Mateus checked the sky app for three full moons in the same year. In the model, Ms. Abernathy holds a small white ball for the Moon. At full moon the ball is on the far side of the globe from the lamp, just above the globe's shadow.

5The full moon in Table 2 was on December 24. The team plans to photograph the faint northern lights on their winter trip, and bright moonlight washes them out. The sky app also lists a total lunar eclipse during a December full moon in a later year, at about 11 AM camp time.