You do know Earth tilts, right?

[chordatesrock]

(I always seem to be a little late to the party with my fandoms...)

So, Avatar: The Last Airbender. The water tribes live at the North and South Poles. You know what that means? It means they're above or below their world's arctic circle, where day and night take an entire year to cycle. Sokka even talks about "midnight sun madness" in an early

Comments

[tiranistion]

Admittedly it involves stretching disbelief, but there are plenty of times in the year at the poles even when day and night cycle in twenty four hours.

[chordatesrock]

Thanks! I didn't know that. :)

[chesneycat]

The day/night cycle ALWAYS cycles over 24 hours. That's kind of a given, unless you want the Avatar world to rotate like something which isn't a solid sphere...

What changes is the length of the day and night components. In winter, day lasts for zero hours, and night for 24. Reverse that for summer, and watch the sun dipping to the horizon in the north and reaching its highest point in the south (if you're in the north...). It doesn't set, but you see it move all around the sky, and you can still mark a 24 hour day cycle by its position. In autumn and spring, you get everything in between, including 12 hours of each.

[chordatesrock]

Thank you. Apparently I didn't know what I was talking about.

[elliemurasaki]

The winter solstice is mid-S1. All the happenings at the Northern Water Tribe city are very late S1. Summer solstice, early S3. Thirty-seven episodes between the solstices, which, assuming a twelve-month year, works out to about six episodes a month. (This is the very sloppy method of timelining; I have not found a timeline that calculates time elapsed in each ep and I do not have the time to do it myself.) Twelve episodes from Winter Solstice to Siege of the North, which if we map to the Gregorian calendar means Siege probably happens in late February.

Here is a February sunrise-sunset calendar for Barrow, Alaska, more than three hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. By the end of February, Barrow's clocking nine hours of sunlight a day. Sun doesn't rise in Barrow from late November to late January, because of where it is with respect to the Arctic Circle, and there's two corresponding months in the summer when the sun doesn't set, but in between they get some daylight and some night just like most everywhere on the planet.

[chordatesrock]

Thanks. That makes a lot of sense. (Wait, is it winter in the Southern hemisphere or the Northern?)

[elliemurasaki]

...good point. But a couple months away from either solstice is still gonna have substantial amounts of both daylight and night at Barrow's latitude.

[chordatesrock]

I didn't say that to disagree, I just realized I seriously don't know. Sokka dismisses... something, I forget what, as midnight sun madness in the first episode, which seems slightly odd if it's Novemberish and dark most of the day (or all of it, I don't know their latitude or the exact timeline), and don't all of the shots of the South Pole show daylight anyway? But the trees are bare on Kyoshi when they visit not long after, and I thought that was in the Southern Hemisphere, too. But maybe I just read the map wrong.

[full_metal_ox]

Tangentially related Fun Fact: that's how it's possible to determine the setting of this Coca-Cola commercial, which ran during the December holiday season, to be the North Pole (and therefore who the home team and visitors are.)

(My own interpretation is that the penguins are vacationers enjoying an exotic HanuKwaYulemas break abroad, and the polar bears indigenous people disturbed by the ruckus; fortunately, the magical reconciliatory power of Coke smooths over any hostilities.)