The sun goes down for five months of the year in Alert, the planet's northernmost permanently inhabited community, leaving the small military and scientific Canadian Arctic outpost in darkness for more than 100 days at a time.
"If I didn't wear a watch, I wouldn't have an idea of what time it is. I think the work schedule is what keeps everybody on the normal clock down south," says master corporal Derek Gauthier, sipping a coffee in a place ironically named The Beach.
Around him, a few parasols and outdoor furniture simulate a Caribbean ambiance, but The Beach relies on neon lighting instead of sunlight.
Outside, it is dark, it seems like nighttime -- but it's 9:30am.
"It is an unnerving feel-ing," admits Gauthier, 33, a traffic technician. "When you wake up, you feel as if it's 2am, you go to work and it is horrible; and when you eat lunch, it is the same thing ... It drains you."
When he first arrived here at the end of June, the southern Ontario native witnessed the phenomenon of 24-hours-a-day sunshine. Last month, he enjoyed cross-country skiing and hang gliding with his buddies at the station -- at 1am.
For the occasional break from the station's military atmosphere, Gauthier and his colleagues would head off for "The Love Shack," probably the northernmost cabin in Canada, located in the Arctic tundra by a lake surrounded by mountains.
"There you can watch the sun: it goes all away around the top of the mountains and you can guess in which part of the world it is daylight," he said.
On Sept. 5, for the first time since April, the sun vanished below the United States Range of mountains -- which is nowhere in sight of the US.
In Alert, where the 75 temporary residents are mostly military personnel on six-month tours and prepared for any excuse to celebrate, a carnival was held to bid farewell to the sun.
Since this final sunset, there have been twilight displays in the sky of beautiful pale yellows to rose colors a few hours a day on the northeast part of Ellesmere Island, where Alert is located, on the shore of Lincoln Sea.
Each day this area loses approximately 40 minutes of daylight until mid-November when the northern Arctic will be plunged into permanent darkness until early February.
Serge Ouellet, now holding the rank of Station Warrant Officer, knows what winter 817 km south of the North Pole means. This soldier who has served almost 30 years in the Canadian Forces can't forget the week in 1990 when he and a few comrades had to thaw out the base's water pipeline which was frozen solid, facing total darkness and temperatures below minus 40oC.
Going from continuous daylight to continuous darkness can be disruptive to the body. This month most of the personnel observed symptoms of this "seasonal effect": insomnia and frequent headaches.
Without the energy supplied by the sun, one has to struggle to be motivated.
"It is a low energy area, it is dark, it is slow moving, everything is slow," says physician assistant Helen Martin, who runs the medical clinic. "So you end up being like that."
In winter even a 100m walk from one building to another is a complicated exercise, requiring more time than normal just to dress. The greatest enemy is the cold.
In Alert, all of the building's entry points have warning signs indicating the weather situation.
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