“I’m not really sure if we’ll see the Northern Lights,” says my fellow video producer Erik Jaråker, as he watches the fog around us.
I was driving along the single lane road that leads to one of the northernmost cities in Sweden – Abisko, located 250 km north of the Arctic Circle. We were caught in the middle of a snowstorm with zero visibility, and all around us, the mountains of Abisko National Park looked like a white sea.
We were traveling to photograph the ephemeral aurora borealis, a spectacular nature light show that occurs when explosions on the Sun’s surface — so-called solar flares — collide with gases in Earth’s atmosphere, creating shimmering bands tinged with red, green and purple.
To witness the aurora borealis activity, we need clear, icy, cloudless skies, not the winter storm we were going through.
“Trust me,” I assured him. “We will see.”
The meteorological explanation
I had been here before with similar storms and quickly learned that in Abisko there is a “blue hole”—a patch of clear sky that offers good visibility at all times, regardless of nearby weather patterns, and extends 10 to 20 km² over the village, Torneträsk lake and Abisko National Park. This phenomenon makes Abisko one of the best places in the world to regularly observe the Northern Lights.
“Abisko and northern Sweden really form an ideal place for observation,” according to Erik Kjellström, professor of Climatology at the Swedish Institute of Hydrology and Meteorology. “This is because it sits in an oval region that exists around the Earth’s magnetic poles and has a very long dark season (aurora observations occur between mid-August and mid-April), so there is strong the aurora borealis. It is only necessary that there are no clouds.”
Kjellström adds that Abisko owes this advantage to its location on the eastern side of the Scandinavian Alps, which straddle the Swedish-Norway border.
Håkan Grudd, research support coordinator and deputy manager at the Abisko Scientific Research Station, explains in more detail.
“The dominant wind in this region comes from the west, which means that moist air masses from the Atlantic Ocean need to rise to higher (cooler) altitudes to cross the Scandinavian Alps. When this happens, clouds form, and the air it loses moisture with precipitation. In Abisko, on the other side of the mountains, the air becomes dry and descends to lower altitudes — the clouds dissipate, and the ‘blue hole’ appears.”
So it’s no wonder that Abisko attracts professional photographers like Jaråker and myself, as well as travelers who want to make this item on their bucket list: see the Northern Lights.
passion that attracts
Photographer and entrepreneur Chad Blakley moved there in 2018 as a young newlywed.
Blakley and his Swedish wife, Linnea, have decided to abandon their professional lives in the United States. Combining his passion for the outdoors and an opportunity to better understand Linnea’s culture, Blakley landed a job cleaning up the popular STF Abisko Turiststation hotel in Abisko National Park.
“I learned about the blue hole from experience,” says Blakley. Early in his career, he spent every possible night photographing the Northern Lights in the national park.
“You could see a hole in the clouds directly over the village, while the sky over the horizon was often cloudy and filled with snow in all directions,” he says.
In 2010, Linnea and Chad Blakley founded a tour agency specializing in the Northern Lights called Lights Over Lapland.
For people who can’t travel to that remote part of Sweden, they’ve installed a fixed camera that, for more than a decade, has taken a picture every five minutes to an annual internet audience of 8 to 10 million people. Later, the company added a camera that broadcasts live, so people can watch the lights in real time.
“We’ve observed the aurora borealis systematically, on almost every clear night, for over ten years,” says Blakley. “And I’m proud to say that the blue hole helped Abisko establish his reputation.”
Blakley is installing the world’s first real-time 8k camera to view the aurora borealis in 360 degrees, which will allow people to see the phenomenon live next season using VR glasses.
native guides
The aurora borealis is Abisko’s main attraction in the winter months, but the microclimate also offers other spectacular events, such as the very rare “moon rainbow”, also known as the moon halo. It occurs when light from the Moon is reflected and refracted by water droplets and ice crystals suspended in the air around the blue hole.
But for Anette Niia and Ylva Sarri, who are part of Sweden’s native Sámi community, Abisko is much more than their blue hole.
There are around 70,000 native Sámi living in the arctic and subarctic region of Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Kola peninsula in Russia. This region is collectively called Sápmi.
Niia and Sarri have been visiting Abisko since childhood because it is also a reindeer breeding region for their families. Niia explains that the region’s microclimate makes the snow thinner in winter, and with that, spring arrives earlier, bringing food for reindeer and other animals.
“The blue hole is something that tourist agencies present,” she says, but “for us Sámi, Abisko is special for other reasons.”
Sarri and she also have ties to tourism in the region. Their family ancestors were mountain guides for visitors in the early 1900s. Today, they are co-founders of Scandinavian Sami Photoadventures, which promotes a variety of outdoor experiences in Abisko, including tours to see the Northern Lights.
“We, as guides, know that we can go from a closed snowstorm to open skies in a matter of 100 meters”, says Niia. “It’s pure magic!”
And that’s exactly what happened when Jaråker and I finally arrived in Abisko: the dense clouds of snow hovered over the mountains around us, while we saw the clear blue sky directly overhead.
‘Best job in the world’
On my first trip to Abisko years ago, I met scientist-turned-photographer Peter Rosén. I remember him telling us that children were not allowed to look or whistle at the dancing dawns, or point at them in admiration, lest the lights go down and carry them away.
Born and raised in Sweden, Rosén had grown up listening to these stories. He became an environmental researcher at the Climate Impact Research Center at Umeå University, also in northern Sweden. And in 1998, his career brought him back to Abisko.
He studied Arctic climate change for 13 years at the Abisko Scientific Research Station. In 2021, the station was recognized as a Centennial Observation Station by the World Meteorological Organization.
Once he arrived in Abisko, Rosén quickly learned about the blue hole and was fascinated by the northern lights. In 2001, he took his first photographs of the aurora, which are now part of permanent exhibitions in galleries across northern Sweden, including the Ice Hotel in the town of Jukkasjärvi.
“My colleagues called me a ‘full-time photographer and part-time researcher,'” he jokes.
In 2012, Rosén had already left his job in Environmental Science to be a full-time photographer and created Lappland Media, which teaches visitors how to properly photograph the aurora.
He remembers one of the visitors, who dreamed of seeing the lights since she was 5 years old. She had tried to see the aurora borealis in Canada, Norway and Finland, to no avail. But on her first night in Abisko, she burst into tears after seeing what Rosén calls a very faint dawn. And on the following nights they witnessed great light shows together.
“Seeing how people express their feelings after seeing the lights makes me feel like I have the best job in the world,” according to Rosén. “I’ve never regretted giving up my life as a researcher, because now I’m living my dream.”
I remember my own sense of wonder the first time I saw the lights in Abisko, on the slopes of Mount Nuolja, 900 meters above sea level. Close to the peak is the remote Aurora Ski Resort, 20 minutes by cable car from its base.
There’s no better place to see the blue hole stretching out over the twinkling lights of Abisko and Lake Torneträsk frozen in the valley below.
This time, as Erik Jaråker and I finally ascended the mountain by cable car into total darkness after driving through that storm, and the experience awakened a sense of awe at the spectacle we were about to witness: ethereal green lights dancing and crossing the skies, like if they were curtains over us.
Read the original version of this report (in English) on the BBC Travel website.
– Text originally published in https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/vert-tra-62231330
