Cold Contrast in the Arctic Landscape
In Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (1986), author Barry Lopez describes the remarkable contrast between light and dark in the Arctic. It is a contrast seen in the landscape and reflected in the extreme at the solstices, when in winter the Sun is content to remain below the horizon and in summer it dances for long hours around the North Pole.
Mountain peaks (nunataks) projecting through the ice cap on northern Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, Can. Credit: © Fred Bruemmer
It was not until after I had read Lopez’s book, when I began to look through photos of the Arctic and its animals, that I came fully to appreciate the extent to which light and dark define that part of the world visually. It is apparent in the open lanes (leads) of water that form between landfast ice and pack ice, where the exposed seawater looks almost black against the stark white of the ice and snow around it. It is apparent, too, in the feathers of the white-tailed ptarmigan and in the turn of the Arctic fox’s coat from white to brown.
White-tailed ptarmigan (Lagopus leucurus) with winter plumage. Credit: Kenneth W. Fink/Root Resources
The contrast between light and dark in the Arctic is perpetuated by cold. Without ice and snow, the play of light on the landscape would be very different. Of course, a land of permafrost and sea ice might be near-impossible to imagine right now, particularly for North Americans who live far south of 66°30′ N latitude (the southern limit of the Arctic Circle). There, in those more southerly latitudes, the summer Sun has left the land awash in a yellow haze of record-breaking heat, making even just the thought of the Arctic coolly refreshing.
Frost smoke, open water, and new and young sea ice at a small lead surrounded by pack ice and icebergs in the Bellingshausen Sea, Antarctica. Credit: M.O. Jeffries, University of Alaska Fairbanks
White phase of an Arctic fox changing to its summer coat. Credit: Russ Kinne—Photo Researchers/EB Inc.
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