But in August, after a few hours of darkness, day begins breaking around 3am, and by 8 the streets are bustling with university students. Winters in Tromsø mean six weeks of polar night when the sun never rises and the dark sky is spangled by the occasional northern lights. Set on an island off the Norwegian mainland, Tromsø, with just more than 75,000 inhabitants, is the largest non-Russian municipality within the Arctic Circle, the 20-million-square-kilometre (7.7-million-square-mile) cap at the north end of the world. In one jar sits a lavender-gray spoonarm octopus the size of a child’s fist.Īltenburger, 41, oversees the Polar Museum’s specimen collection in Tromsø, a small but lively city that serves as a gateway for climate researchers studying the Arctic Ocean’s warming waters. In other containers, brown-gray deep sea sponges sway in ethanol. “Velvet belly lanternshark, 1923,” reads the label in old-fashioned flowery script. Tromsø, Norway – In a cold basement room in the Arctic, Andreas Altenburger moves among row after row of marine specimens.
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