Arctic Circle

Where it is and why it’s moving toward the pole

On January 1, 2026, the Arctic Circle was at 66° 33′ 50.8″ N (66.56410° N). Its latitude is 90° minus the tilt of Earth’s axis (23° 26′ 09.2″), worked out with the International Astronomical Union’s formula for the mean obliquity (IAU 2006).

That tilt shrinks by about 0.47″ a year, so the circle creeps north by about 14.5 m every year: 0.9 mi (1.5 km) in a century. Nutation adds a wobble of up to 9.2″ (about 280 m) every 18.6 years, which maps don’t draw.

North of the circle lie 21.2 million km², 4.2% of Earth’s surface.

Where it runs: eight countries

The Arctic Circle is 9,932 mi (15,984 km) long. Unlike its southern twin, it runs mostly over land: 11,983 km (75%), against 3,761 km of sea. It crosses 8 countries: Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, United States, Canada, Greenland (Denmark), and Iceland.

The longest stretch is in Russia: 4,177 mi (6,722 km) of land, from Karelia to Chukotka, almost halfway around.

In Canada it crosses Great Bear Lake for 72 mi (115 km). In Iceland it only touches Grímsey island, 40 km off the north coast: in the Natural Earth data the line barely clips its northern tip.

Cities on and inside the circle

Salekhard, in Russia, lies just 2.0 mi (3.2 km) from the line and is often called the only city in the world right on the Arctic Circle. Rovaniemi (Finland) is 4.4 mi (7.1 km) to the south: the circle crosses its airport, and the Santa Claus Village on the outskirts marks it with a white line on the ground.

No national capital lies inside the circle: the closest is Reykjavík, 167 mi (269 km) to the south. The largest towns north of the line are Murmansk and Norilsk in Russia and Tromsø in Norway:

The largest towns north of the Arctic Circle

According to Natural Earth, these are the largest places inside the Arctic Circle, with their distance to the line:

Midnight sun and polar night

Right on the circle, the sun doesn’t set at the June solstice (around the 21st) and doesn’t rise at the December solstice. The farther north you go, the longer it lasts: at the North Pole there are about six months of daylight and six of darkness.

The atmosphere bends light and makes the sun look a little higher than it really is. Add the size of the sun’s disk, and part of the midnight sun can be seen up to about 50 arcminutes south of the circle, roughly 58 mi (93 km), at sea level.

The circle marks a limit set by geometry, not climate: how cold the Arctic gets also depends on ocean currents, the sea and elevation.

Arctic Circle facts

On Grímsey, Iceland, a concrete sphere of about eight tonnes called Orbis et Globus has marked the circle since 2017, and it gets moved as the line advances. According to forecasts quoted by Wikipedia and the press, the circle will leave the island behind around 2047.

In Alaska the circle runs for 564 mi (908 km) over land, from the Seward Peninsula to the Canadian border.