Only one city in the world sits right on the Arctic Circle
Salekhard in Russia is the only city built directly on the Arctic Circle. North of the line, Murmansk has nearly 300,000 people and weeks of unbroken darkness each winter, while Norilsk swings from summer highs near 30 °C to winter lows below minus 50 °C. The line itself is slowly creeping toward the pole.
The Arctic Circle is one of two polar circles and the most northerly of the five main latitude lines on world maps, drawn at roughly 66° 34′ N. It marks the southern limit of polar night and midnight sun: on it, the Sun in principle fails to rise at the December solstice and fails to set at the June one, and the effect lengthens toward the pole. In Murmansk, three degrees farther north, the Sun stays hidden for about 20 days either side of the winter solstice and stays up for a similar stretch around midsummer. The name arctic comes from Greek arktos, bear, meaning near the Bear in the northern sky.
Its exact position is currently 66°33′51.1″ N, and it shifts because Earth's axial tilt swings by about 2° over 41,000 years under the Moon's tidal influence. For now the circle is heading poleward at around 14.5 m a year. Refraction, mirages and the Sun's width mean part of the midnight sun can be glimpsed about 90 km south of the line at sea level, and farther from high ground.
Russia, Norway and Sweden hold the biggest Arctic towns: Murmansk with 295,374 residents, Norilsk 178,018, Tromsø 75,638, Vorkuta 58,133, Bodø 52,357 and Kiruna 22,841. Finland's Rovaniemi lies just 6 km short of the line. Elsewhere numbers are tiny: Sisimiut in Greenland has about 5,600 people, Utqiagvik in Alaska about 5,000 and Inuvik in Canada 3,137. Thanks to the Gulf Stream, Norway's coast stays mild and harbours along the Norwegian and northwest Russian Arctic shore never freeze over.
The circle measures about 16,000 km around and encloses roughly 20 million square kilometres, about 4% of Earth's surface, crossing the Arctic Ocean, Scandinavia, North Asia, North America and Greenland, and clipping Iceland's island of Grímsey. Land and national waters inside it belong to eight countries, but under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea no state owns the North Pole or the surrounding high seas.
Source: Arctic Circle
