Twilight in Fairbanks

Here we are, Fairbanks Alaska! When we land at the Fairbanks International Airport, it is around one in the morning. Although the sun has set since a couple of hours, it is not completely dark, it is twilight and it will stay like this until the sun will rise again around 4.00 am. This is already quite interesting for us. Back in Zurich, we wondered how it will be without darkness at night, and now that we are experiencing it, it feels quite exciting. For those who are not familiar with the term ‘twilight’, or those who tried to look for its definition on the web and got frustrated finding only information about the saga, here are a few words on this topic: twilight is defined as the period of time before the sunrise or after the sunset. In this period, although the sun is behind the horizon, light is scattered from the upper to the lower atmosphere and we still have light. It is divided into civil, nautical and astronomical twilight, depending on the position of the sun below the horizon. The duration of twilight depends on the latitude and the day of the year. At the equator it can be as short as 20 minutes. The farther away from the equator, the longer the twilight lasts. Fairbanks is located at 64.8° N, quite a good location to experience long twilight time!

The new terminal of the airport, built in the 2000s by a company from Hong Kong, is a rather modern glass structure designed following energy efficiency criteria. It would be nice to have a closer look at the building, but we are quite tired. The trip has been smooth but rather long. Anyway, Dana is waiting for us at the arrivals. Dana is the wife of Pascal’s hosting Professor, she is also a scientist. They and their two nice girls were so kind to offer us to stay at their house for our first days in Alaska, until we find a place to rent.

Waking up surrounded by awesome wilderness and delicious pancakes

Perhaps because of the jet lag, or the absence of darkness, we can sleep only little. Luckily, when we get up, we find a nice surprise: Dana’s daughters have prepared pancakes for us! Our first breakfast in Alaska is a typical American breakfast (or at least we think it is): delicious pancakes, maple syrup and brewed coffee! We feel very lucky. We feel even luckier when we look outside the windows and perhaps blessed when we step outside of the house and we realize where we are. We are in a beautiful house in the middle of a boreal forest. Around us only tall birches, small trails into the woods, and majestic nature. It seems like a perfect starting point to experience this big country.

How big is Alaska?

By the way, how big is Alaska? Alaska is the largest state in the U.S., it covers an area of roughly 1.7 million square kilometers, more than twice as big as Texas. Alaska is more than 40 times bigger than Switzerland and almost 6 times bigger than Italy. These numbers are quite impressive, without mentioning wilderness. The population density in Alaska is about 0.4 inhabitants per square kilometer, against almost 200 of Italy and Switzerland, and 7’150 of Singapore. The actual population of Alaska (about 740’000 inhabitants) is roughly the same as the cities of Amsterdam or Valencia - quite some space to spread out less than a million people.

Let’s do a small digression. You might be fully aware of it, or you might have never heard of it, either way, it seems worth to recall here that the common maps of the world that we all have looked at misrepresent the size of countries. Indeed, all maps misrepresent reality because it is not possible to project the surface of a sphere onto a plane sheet without some form of distortion. The most common maps are based on (transverse) Mercator projection, which preserves the shape of the continents but distorts their size. The closer to the poles, the greater the distortion is. A typical example: Greenland looks as big as Africa, while in reality Africa is more than 14 times larger. You can have fun comparing the size of different countries in the truesize.com website. When we look at maps, we are looking at one possible representation of reality … good to remember!