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in September, the Sun rises, and then doesn't set again until March.

With that much daylight, we can work pretty much all the time, and we want to work as much as we can. It's not just that we love our work, though we certainly do; we only get into the field for a short time each year, so we want to make the most of it. We run shifts around the clock, each of us working for eight to twelve hours; it doesn't matter which shift each of us gets, because it is always light outside. We sleep less in Antarctica than we usually do-the constant sunlight can make sleeping difficult, and most members of the team work longer hours than they would at home. But we have developed a few tricks to help us sleep-we can cover our portholes with aluminum foil, wear sleep "goggles" or bury ourselves in the blankets!

Unless you live at one of the poles, you probably don't have to take such drastic measures to get to sleep at night; most places on Earth experience daily changes in light, with a period of dark followed by a period of light every day. Why then does Antarctica have six whole months of darkness in the winter and six whole months of lightness in the summer?

In most places on Earth, there are daily changes in light-light all day and darkness all night. These daily changes occur because Earth rotates on its axis, spinning once around in roughly twenty-four hours-slow enough so that we don't get dizzy. For part of that time, the period we call daytime, a given place on Earth, such as your town, faces the Sun. For the remainder of the twenty-four-hour rotation, the period we call nighttime, Earth has turned, and that same area is on the side of Earth facing away from the Sun.

So why do we have changes in daylight over the course of the year?

You've probably noticed that these annual changes in light patterns are tied to the seasons, with a longer daytime period in the summer and a shorter daytime period in the winter. To figure out how daylight is connected to seasons, then, we have to first consider how seasons work.

There are two reasons that we have seasons.

  • First, Earth's axis is tilted.
  • Second, Earth revolves around the Sun once every 365 days.
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