The polar night is getting darker in a warming Arctic, BTA reports. 

At 10:40 a.m. on a January day, two powerful beams of light from the Svalbard governor's boat pierce the total darkness above the mountain-lined fjord.

She transports the church's children's choir to this remote location, bound for an even more isolated arctic corner.

It's polar night on this Norwegian archipelago - so close to the North Pole that the Sun sits at least six degrees below the horizon from mid-November to late January.

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For miners, explorers and tourism workers of more than 50 nationalities, who make up the majority of Svalbard's roughly 3,000 inhabitants, it is initially a challenge to adjust to life here - a place without trees and a black-and-white landscape.

"The first time I came to Svalbard, it was like going to the moon," says the Reverend Leif Magne Helgesen, who for ten years until 2019 was the pastor of the local church.

It is the only one in the administrative center of Longyearbyen.

Then the polar night becomes an opportunity to slow down and appreciate the only glimpses of natural light - the stars, the elusive swirls of the aurora borealis and the full Moon that does not hide for several days.

Almost every window has a candle or star decoration as a sign of hospitality.

In the dark, the headlights of infrequently passing vehicles and snowmobiles highlight the eyes of a reindeer, or the reflective vests and bands everyone wears as they walk or ski around.

The glow is mostly from the snow cover.

This is changing, however, as the Arctic, and especially this archipelago, is swept by warm currents, temperatures are rising faster than most of the rest of the world, and snowfall is decreasing.

This winter in Svalbard it has been raining for several weeks after the onset of the polar night.

"When the dark season comes, we are used to seeing the northern lights, the moon, stars and snow shining. But now it has become dark and depressing," said Espen Rothevatn, headmaster of a school in Longyearbyen.

He believes local solutions to climate change are needed.

Arctic