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SUN :
DARKNESS :
COUNTRIES: NORWAY :
PSYCHOLOGY:
The Dark Town with a Giant 'Sun Mirror'
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The Dark Town with a Giant 'Sun Mirror'
A Norwegian town shrouded in shadow for half the year has found an
ingenious way to get a bit of sunlight. But why go to such extreme
measures? As Linda Geddes discovers, the Sun has powerful effects on our
minds and bodies and it changes us when its absent.
By Linda Geddes
From Mosaic
14 March 2017
BBC News
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/
20170314-the-town-that-built-a-mirror-to-catch-the-sun
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A shorter URL for the above link:
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http://tinyurl.com/jtbvlze
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The inhabitants of Rjukan in southern Norway have a complex relationship
with the Sun. More than other places Ive lived, they like to talk about
the Sun: when its coming back, if its a long time since theyve seen the
Sun, says artist Martin Andersen. Theyre a little obsessed with it.
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Possibly, he speculates, its because for approximately half the year, you
can see the sunlight shining high up on the north wall of the valley: It
is very close, but you cant touch it, he says. As autumn wears on, the
light moves higher up the wall each day, like a calendar marking off the
dates to the winter solstice. And then as January, February and March
progress, the sunlight slowly starts to inch its way back down again.
Rjukan was built between 1905 and 1916, after an entrepreneur called Sam
Eyde bought the local waterfall (known as the smoking waterfall) and
constructed a hydroelectric power plant there. Factories producing
artificial fertiliser followed. But the managers of these factories
worried that their staff werent getting enough Sun and eventually they
constructed a cable car in order to give them access to it.
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When Martin moved to Rjukan in August 2002, he was simply looking for a
temporary place to settle with his young family that was close to his
parents house and where he could earn some money. He was drawn to the
three-dimensionality of the place: a town of 3,000, in the cleft between
two towering mountains the first seriously high ground you reach as you
travel west of Oslo.
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But the departing Sun left Martin feeling gloomy and lethargic. It still
rose and set each day, and provided some daylight unlike in the far north
of Norway, where it is dark for months at a time but the Sun never
climbed high enough for the people of Rjukan to actually see it or feel
its warming rays directly on their skin.
As summer turned to autumn, Martin found himself pushing his two-year-old
daughters buggy further and further down the valley each day, chasing the
vanishing sunlight. I felt it very physically; I didnt want to be in the
shade, says Martin, who runs a vintage shop in Rjukan town centre. If only
someone could find a way of reflecting some sunlight down into the town,
he thought. Most people living at temperate latitudes will be familiar
with Martins sense of dismay at autumns dwindling light. Few would have
been driven to build giant mirrors above their town to fix it.
Dark place
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What is it about the flat, gloomy greyness of winter that seems to
penetrate our skin and dampen our spirits, at least at higher latitudes?
The idea that our physical and mental health varies with the seasons and
sunlight goes back a long way. The Yellow Emperors Classic of Medicine, a
treatise on health and disease thats estimated to have been written in
around 300 BCE, describes how the seasons affect all living things. It
suggests that during winter a time of conservation and storage one
should retire early and get up with the sunrise... Desires and mental
activity should be kept quiet and subdued, as if keeping a happy secret.
And in his Treatise on Insanity, published in 1806, the French physician
Philippe Pinel noted a mental deterioration in some of his psychiatric
patients when the cold weather of December and January set in.
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Today, this mild form of malaise is often called the winter blues. And for
a minority of people who suffer from seasonal affective disorder (SAD),
winter is quite literally depressing. First described in the 1980s, the
syndrome is characterised by recurrent depressions that occur annually at
the same time each year.
Even healthy people who have no seasonal problems seem to experience this
low-amplitude change over the year, with worse mood and energy during
autumn and winter and an improvement in spring and summer.
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The complete article may be read at the URL above.
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Sincerely,
David Dillard
Temple University
(215) 204 - 4584
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