Arctic Circle

The sky was an ambiguous blue - pale pastel at the horizon but deepening toward navy overhead. It was just 1:30 in the afternoon, but nightfall was rushing forward. Hannu Alajaasko and Reijo Ylijaasko had to hurry if they wanted to see the exact spot they were hunting for before darkness fell. Surveyors for the municipality of Rovaniemi in the Finnish province of Lapland, the two were - at the behest of an ignorant journalist - searching for the Arctic Circle. It seemed a simple enough job. Go to the exact spot where that dotted Arctic Circle line, seen on all maps and globes, circles the top of the Earth about 66.5 degrees north of the equator.

In the birding world, it is called a "staging" of swans, and in late winter, the best theater in Pennsylvania is here at Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area, on the border of Lancaster and Lebanon Counties. As many as 5,000 whistling swans descend on Middle Creek about this time of year, gathering their forces and energy before continuing the spring migration to the tundra of the Arctic Circle. Middle Creek is one of the largest concentrations of the magnificent birds in the Middle Atlantic states.

With temperatures in the 90s, the Philadelphia Zoo is a long way from the Arctic Circle, but these polar bears find a way to beat the heat. One (left) wasits for a cold one on the rocks, while another (above) cools off with the paws that refreshes. More hot weather is on the way.

MOSCOW GREENPEACE SAYS SHIP FIRED UPON Greenpeace said a Russian ship yesterday fired flares at one of the scout vessels the environmental group sailed without permission toward a former Soviet nuclear test site above the Arctic circle. No flares hit the Greenpeace ship Solo, which sped back into international waters from the Russian-controlled Kara Straits after the encounter, Greenpeace said. A Russian coast guard official denied that any shots had been fired, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.

About 5,000 whistling swans descend at the Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area, on the border of Lancaster and Lebanon Counties, about this time of year. They gather and build their energy before continuing a migration to the Arctic Circle's tundra. Their winters are spent on the Chesapeake Bay and other bodies of water from Delaware to North Carolina.

"Lovers of the Arctic Circle" is the fatalistic, enigmatic, racier Euro version of the Hollywood romantic destiny movie. In our Hollywood version, usually a comedy starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, two bubbly people with a ready supply of one-liners stumble through a series of comic misadventures until they meet at a tourist attraction and instantly fall in love. There is a cute puppy yapping as they share their first kiss, and Louis Armstong sings "What a Wonderful World," part of a soundtrack CD featuring 12 popular standards.

Like the rest of us, the gifted young Spanish director Julio Medem is tantalized by the strange twists of fate that bring lovers together and sometimes keep them apart. In his unabashedly romantic Lovers of the Arctic Circle, Medem is bent on testing one's faith in coincidence to the very limit. He pulls it off by shaping a film that works as a shrewd mix of the objective and subjective. Medem himself offers the cool, distanced perspective as a counterpoint to the fevered, first-person viewpoints of Ana and Otto, who alternately take up the narration and whose passionate belief that their destinies are entwined is borne out repeatedly in the course of the film.

On the day after nature served the region an April cocktail of snow mixed with blossom petals, this news might be hard to accept. But in some of the coldest parts of the planet, the spring growing season is arriving about a good week earlier than it did not so long ago, according to researchers. In addition, they said, satellite data show that the growing season has lengthened by as much as two weeks in those regions. Their results were published in last week's journal Nature.

GEORGE SCARPULLA was one of the pioneers who braved the crumbling and shuttered neighborhood called Society Hill in the early '70s and transformed it into an urban miracle. But that was only one of George's accomplishments. He was an engineer whose work took him from the South Pacific to the Arctic Circle and many places in between. He worked as site manager on the "cruiser in a cornfield," a replica of a Navy ship that attracts considerable curiosity in a field in Moorestown, N.J., used to test radar equipment for the Navy's Aegis program.

You may not believe there's any more blood to suck from the shriveled corpse of the vampire movie, but you'd be wrong. "30 Days of Night" finds a way, moving the setting north of the Arctic circle to Point Barrow, Alaska, where marauding vampires migrate to take advantage of a full month of midwinter darkness. As the date for nightfall approaches, the Point Barrow police chief (Josh Hartnett) investigates a series of puzzling crimes - someone has stolen and burned all cell phones, murdered all the sled dogs and disabled the emergency helicopter.

It's a long and twisty trail that leads from Alexander the Great to Larry the Cable Guy, but the History Channel would gladly travel it again. The cable outlet launched on New Year's Day in 1995 with lofty aspirations befitting its name. It offered a library of documentaries about everything from the Precambrian Era to the Crusades to the Korean War. Ladies and gentlemen, we have discovered the cure for insomnia. The subject matter was too dry for TV's heightened narrative style.

GEORGE SCARPULLA was one of the pioneers who braved the crumbling and shuttered neighborhood called Society Hill in the early '70s and transformed it into an urban miracle. But that was only one of George's accomplishments. He was an engineer whose work took him from the South Pacific to the Arctic Circle and many places in between. He worked as site manager on the "cruiser in a cornfield," a replica of a Navy ship that attracts considerable curiosity in a field in Moorestown, N.J., used to test radar equipment for the Navy's Aegis program.

You may not believe there's any more blood to suck from the shriveled corpse of the vampire movie, but you'd be wrong. "30 Days of Night" finds a way, moving the setting north of the Arctic circle to Point Barrow, Alaska, where marauding vampires migrate to take advantage of a full month of midwinter darkness. As the date for nightfall approaches, the Point Barrow police chief (Josh Hartnett) investigates a series of puzzling crimes - someone has stolen and burned all cell phones, murdered all the sled dogs and disabled the emergency helicopter.

Next stop: Indianapolis. Federal officials said yesterday they had found a home in that Midwestern city for a female gray seal that has spent the last six months in a Brigantine facility recuperating from a broken back. The Indianapolis Zoo will welcome the 7-month-old female pup next month. It will join four California sea lions, three harbor seals, and one gray seal in the zoo's collection. "This is the best news we've had in days," said Bob Schoelkopf, director of the Marine Mammal Stranding Center in Brigantine.

My husband and I spent not your average honeymoon on a river expedition trip in the Brooks Range in Alaska, billed as "The Magic Canyons of the Iniakuk. " We flew from Philadelphia to Fairbanks to Bettles (north of the Arctic Circle) in progressively smaller aircraft until we touched down on a lake in a floatplane. Four of us embarked upon an eight-day journey in inflatable canoes. We floated down the Iniakuk River as it cut through other-worldly canyons with clear, deep-emerald pools.

Congress has an annoyingly inconsistent attitude toward energy policy. As the House takes up the 2003 energy bill this week, the urgent issue of improving fuel economy in cars and sport-utility vehicles will get the "been there, done that" treatment. "There's been a thorough hashing out of the issue," one influential auto-industry lobbyist said dismissively, referring to debates in 2001 and 2002. Yet the House happily plans to rehash the perennial stalemate of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

As a winter-wary nation turns to a hole in the ground in Punxsutawney, Pa., to await the weather wisdom of a light-blinded rodent, Wayne Higgins will be focusing on the upper atmosphere near the Arctic Circle. Higgins, a scientist at the government's Climate Prediction Center, and other climate researchers believe that the key to the U.S. winter rests in a region where six more weeks of darkness is an absolute certainty. They are watching something called the Arctic Oscillation, or AO, an air-pressure and wind pattern that is a relative newcomer in the lexicon of weather.

This summer, Ted Daeschler found himself stuck in a pup tent as howling winds blew snow across the tundra. His only bunk mate was a shotgun to ward off polar bears. Back home in Philadelphia, it was sweltering in the 90s. Daeschler, the curator for paleontology at the Academy of Natural Sciences, had journeyed to Melville Island, some 450 miles above the Arctic Circle, in search of fossils. "We were there for summer, but summer in the Arctic only lasts two weeks," Daeschler explained.

"Lovers of the Arctic Circle" is the fatalistic, enigmatic, racier Euro version of the Hollywood romantic destiny movie. In our Hollywood version, usually a comedy starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, two bubbly people with a ready supply of one-liners stumble through a series of comic misadventures until they meet at a tourist attraction and instantly fall in love. There is a cute puppy yapping as they share their first kiss, and Louis Armstong sings "What a Wonderful World," part of a soundtrack CD featuring 12 popular standards.

Like the rest of us, the gifted young Spanish director Julio Medem is tantalized by the strange twists of fate that bring lovers together and sometimes keep them apart. In his unabashedly romantic Lovers of the Arctic Circle, Medem is bent on testing one's faith in coincidence to the very limit. He pulls it off by shaping a film that works as a shrewd mix of the objective and subjective. Medem himself offers the cool, distanced perspective as a counterpoint to the fevered, first-person viewpoints of Ana and Otto, who alternately take up the narration and whose passionate belief that their destinies are entwined is borne out repeatedly in the course of the film.