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I'm going to level with you: this is going
to be a fairly disappointing video.

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Because when I found out there's a sundial
that works 24 hours a day, I thought, I'll

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go there, I'll film it. And then...

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But when the skies are clear, this sundial
can work 24 hours a day. Or at least, it can

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for more than three months of the year. Because
this sundial is in Longyearbyen, in Svalbard,

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in the Arctic Circle, and this should be the
midnight sun.

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It is the summer equinox today, as I record
this, and we are so far north that even now,

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close to midnight, hence the whispering, the
sun is up in the sky. It'll be there for another

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couple of months, rising and falling but never
dipping below the horizon. And importantly,

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it will never be high in the sky either: this
part of the Earth is never pointed anywhere

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even close to the sun, so the sun always appears
low and close to the horizon. For that same

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reason, the gnomon - the bit here that casts
the shadow - is steep, steeper than any other

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sundial in the world.

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And there's a really clever bit of design
here that only makes sense on a sundial like

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this. Most sundials have a gap at noon: you
have to account for the thickness of the gnomon,

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so in the morning you read from one side of
the shadow, and in the afternoon you read

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from the other. It jumps over that gap in
the middle.

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But this sundial works at midnight, so at
some point, it has to switch back. So here,

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it overlaps. There's a little overlap. You
could also solve that problem with an incredibly

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thin gnomon, but then it might not stand up
to the four months of constant arctic night,

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when it won't work at all.

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It's 1am. We are half way home, on the mile
walk back to our hotel.

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And the sun's come out.

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