- Lola Akinmade Akerstrom
- BBC trip*
July 19, 2022
Credit, Getty Images
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Abisko is one of Sweden’s northernmost towns, located 250 km north of the Arctic Circle.
“I’m not sure if we’ll see the Northern Lights,” says my colleague Erik Jaråker while observing the fog around us.
I drove along the single lane road that leads to one of Sweden’s northernmost towns Abisko, located 250 km north of the Arctic Circle. We were caught in the middle of a blizzard with zero visibility, and all around us the mountains of Abisko National Park looked like a white sea.
We went to photograph the ephemeral auroras, a spectacular natural light show that occurs when explosions on the Sun’s surface called solar flares collide with gases in Earth’s atmosphere, creating shimmering bands of red, green, and purple hues.
To witness Aurora Borealis activity we need clear, frigid, cloudless skies, not the winter storm we went through.
“Trust me,” I assured him. “We will see.”
The meteorological explanation
Having been here before with similar storms, I quickly learned that there is a “blue hole” in Abisko a patch of clear sky that offers good permanent visibility regardless of the weather conditions in the area and stretches for 1020 km² Village, Lake Torneträsk and Abisko National Park. This phenomenon makes Abisko one of the best places in the world to regularly see the Northern Lights.
“Abisko and northern Sweden are really ideal observation sites,” says Erik Kjellström, professor of climatology at the Swedish Institute of Hydrology and Meteorology. “That’s because it’s in an oval region that exists around Earth’s magnetic poles and has a very long dark season (aurora observations occur between midAugust and midApril), so there’s strong Aurora Borealis.” It is only necessary that there be no clouds.”
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Northern Lights viewing usually takes place in Abisko between midAugust and the month of April.
Kjellström adds that Abisko owes this advantage to its location on the east side of the Scandinavian Alps, which straddle the SwedishNorwegian border.
Håkan Grudd, Research Support Coordinator and Deputy Director at Abisko Scientific Research Station, explains in more detail.
“The prevailing wind in this region is from the west, which means that humid air masses from the Atlantic have to rise to higher (cooler) altitudes in order to cross the Scandinavian Alps. When this happens, clouds form and the air loses moisture with precipitation. In Abisko, on the other side of the mountains, the air becomes dry and descends to lower altitudes the clouds break up and the “blue hole” appears.”
So it’s no wonder that Abisko attracts professional photographers like Jaråker and me, as well as travelers who want to add this item to their bucket list: see the Northern Lights.
Passion that attracts
Photographer and entrepreneur Chad Blakley moved there in 2018 as a newlywed couple.
Blakley and his Swedish wife Linnea have decided to give up 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 as a cleaner at 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.
“A hole in the clouds could be seen just above the village, while the sky above the horizon was often cloudy and covered with snow in all directions,” he says.
In 2010, Linnea and Chad Blakley started a Northern Lights travel agency called Lights Over Lapland.
For people unable to travel to this remote part of Sweden, they have installed a fixed camera that has been taking a picture every five minutes for more than a decade for an annual internet audience of 8 to 10 million people. The company later added a camera that broadcasts live so people can watch the lights in real time.
Credit, Getty Images
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Abisko is marked by a “blue hole” a patch of sky that remains clear regardless of the weather conditions around it.
“We’ve been systematically observing the Aurora Borealis on almost every clear night for over a decade,” says Blakley. “And I’m proud to say that the blue hole has helped Abisko build its reputation.”
Blakley is installing the world’s first realtime 8k camera to view the Aurora Borealis in 360 degrees, allowing people to see the phenomenon live with VR goggles next season.
local guides
The Northern Lights are Abisko’s main attraction during the winter months, but the microclimate also offers other spectacular events, such as the very rare ‘lunar rainbow’, also known as the moon halo. It occurs when light from the moon is reflected and refracted by water droplets and ice crystals floating in the air around the blue hole.
But for Anette Niia and Ylva Sarri, who are part of Sweden’s Sámi community, Abisko is much more than their blue hole.
About 70,000 native Sámi live 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 they were children because it is also a reindeer herding region for their families. Niia explains that the region’s microclimate thins the snow in winter, allowing spring to arrive earlier, bringing fodder for reindeer and other animals.
“The blue hole is something that travel agencies present,” she says, but “for us Sámi, Abisko is special for other reasons.”
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Peter Rosén: “Seeing how people express their feelings after seeing the lights makes me feel like I have the best job in the world.”
Sarri and she also have links with tourism in the region. Their family ancestors were mountain guides for visitors in the early 1900s. Today they are cofounders 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 blizzard to open skies in just 100 meters,” says Niia. “It’s pure magic!”
And that’s exactly what happened when Jaråker and I finally arrived in Abisko: the dense snow clouds hovered over the mountains around us, while we saw the bright blue sky directly above us.
“Best job in the world”
On my first trip to Abisko years ago, I met scientist and photographer Peter Rosén. I remember he told us that children are not allowed to look at the dancing dawns or whistle or point admiringly lest the lights go out and carry them away.
Born and raised in Sweden, Rosén grew up with these stories. He became an environmental researcher at Umeå University’s Climate Impact Research Centre, also in northern Sweden. And in 1998 his career took him back to Abisko.
He studied Arctic climate change at Abisko Scientific Research Station for 13 years. In 2021, the station was recognized by the World Meteorological Organization as a Centennial Observation Station.
Arriving in Abisko, Rosén quickly learned about the blue hole and was fascinated by the Northern Lights. In 2001 he took his first Northern Lights photos, 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 ‘fulltime photographer and parttime researcher,'” he jokes.
Back in 2012, Rosén left his job in environmental sciences to become a fulltime photographer and founded Lapland Media, which teaches visitors how to properly photograph the Northern Lights.
He remembers one of the visitors who dreamed of seeing the lights since she was 5 years old. She had tried unsuccessfully to see the Northern Lights in Canada, Norway and Finland. But on her first night in Abisko, she broke down in tears when she saw what Rosén calls a very faint dawn. And in the following nights they experienced 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,” said Rosén. “I have never regretted giving up my life as a researcher because now I’m living my dream.”
I remember my own amazement when I first saw the lights in Abisko on the slopes of Mount Nuolja, 900 meters above sea level. Near the summit is the remote Aurora Ski Resort, a 20minute cable car ride from its base.
There is no better place to see the blue hole stretching across the twinkling lights of Abisko and Lake Torneträsk frozen in the valley.
This time, after riding through that storm, Erik Jaråker and I finally took the cable car up the mountain in total darkness and the experience inspired a sense of awe at the spectacle we were about to witness: ethereal green lights dancing and cross the sky as if they were curtains over us.
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