Celebrating Hanukkah Where the Sun Never Sets

All around the world, Hanukkah celebrations are in full swing tonight, or at sunset in your geographical location. For some locales—like at the Israel Institute of Technology, where four years ago they created a Rube Goldberg machine to light their menorah —sunset is easily defined, but at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, they have a tougher time deciding when to celebrate.

McMurdo Station, established in December 1955, is “the logistics hub of the U.S. Antarctic Program.” The station is home to about 85 buildings, which include “repair facilities, dormitories, administrative buildings, a firehouse, [and] a power plant.” One notable building is the Crary Lab, which hosts a variety of activities from environmental monitoring to snow and ice mechanics.

A byproduct of being in Antarctica, the staff at McMurdo experience only two seasons: summer and winter, with six months of daylight and six months of darkness, respectively. At the South Pole (90 degrees south), sunlight works exactly as described above. At McMurdo Station, the transition from daylight to darkness is less linear because it’s located at 77 degrees, 51 minutes south, 166 degrees, 40 minutes east.

For comparison purposes, you can also see the hours of daylight for IEEE GlobalSpec, Inc.’s headquarters. (By the way, I got these graphics from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s amazing Daylight Hours Explorer, and the Australian Antarctic Division also has a great video clip showing the change of daylight hours across their various stations.)

By now, you may have forgotten why I’ve told you all of this. The point is: Hanukkah (celebrated at sunset) falls only three days after the winter solstice, in the middle of Antarctica’s summer season when the sun never sets. According to Jenna Kloosterman, a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow who spent the 2015-2016 Antarctic summer at McMurdo, “there was no actual consensus about when the candle lighting should actually take place” during last year’s Hanukkah celebration. Evidently, some wanted to sync their celebrations with Israel, home (the U.S.), or the closest sunset (New Zealand), but the decision was eventually made by the fire marshal—he was available at 7:15 PM.

The fire marshal at McMurdo had so much sway in the decision making because “lighting candles is strictly forbidden at McMurdo,” but “the base requested special permission,” which was granted so long as the fire marshal was present for the lighting of the one menorah permitted in the McMurdo gallery for the occasion.

Image Credit for “Lighting the Hanukkah candles in McMurdo” to Jenna Kloosterman