Nordic Freeze, temperatures drop to -40°C across Sweden, Norway and Finland
I celebrated this Christmas in perhaps the most Christmassy place on earth — in Finnish Lapland. More specifically, I spent two weeks in the Ylläs area, around 150 km above the Arctic circle, and a two hour drive from Santa’s hometown, Rovaniemi.
The landscape of Finnish Lapland is unlike any other I’ve seen before, with trees so snow-laden they either bow beneath the weight, or become so amorphous they look almost alien. On a clear day in December, you can be lucky enough to experience the polar night, where the sun skirts along the horizon for a few hours and creates a candyfloss sky. At night, the pink hues are traded for greyish-green as the northern lights swell and swirl above frozen lakes, snow topped forests and small tourist towns.
As you can imagine, this is a place well adept at dealing with the cold. With snow covering the ground from early November to late May, everything from transport to tourism is built for the winter season. This Christmas, however, Lapland and many other areas across the Nordics have been experiencing a “winter freeze”, with unprecedented temperatures dropping lower than even -40°C (BBC, 2024). Reported to be the coldest January for 25 years (Bloomberg, 2024), the extreme temperature drop and icy conditions were responsible for chaos across transport systems as well as record-breaking surges in power prices.
As temperatures plummeted in our second week, locals and long-time winter veterans shared their apprehension-come-amazement of the incoming freeze. One rental shop assistant explained he’d been cycling to work for the past few years without trouble, but the threat of -35°C was giving cause for concern about the durability of his bike. At the Ylläs ski resort, one instructor shared that this was the first time she’d experienced lower than -25°C on the ski slopes (due to the fells’ natural temperature inversion) in all her 20 years of experience. And as we checked ourselves into Harriniva’s Arctic Sauna World, our host warned us that even she drew the line at a post-sauna lake swim once the thermometer hits -30°C.
Taking the overnight train from Rovaniemi back to Helsinki, our return journey also felt the sting of the cold. In the same trains that manufacturer Skoda have described as being “built to withstand any winter weather” (Skoda, 2022), we found ourselves in carriages with frozen pipes, and cabins with no toilets or running water. The thick frost framing external doors, alongside the bumpy ride over icy rails and lumps of snow showed that even this Nordic engineering with over-pressurised cabinets and specially designed ventilation systems, was beginning to struggle with the temperatures outside.
Such extreme cold snaps are considered to be a part of the phenomenon of climate disruption, as global warming affects our weather systems. When contextualised with livelihoods, systems and infrastructures, the impact of such adverse weather conditions undoubtedly demonstrate the intersectionality of environmental and social issues. If countries with infrastructures built to withstand severe weather conditions can still face power outages, major transport disruption, and surging power prices as a result of these dramatic meteorological events, we can only imagine how other differently prepared regions will cope with our rapidly changing climate. As extreme weather events become more and more frequent, we must be looking to the resilience of our infrastructures, systems and communities.
