Extreme Weather Stories: Nordic Freeze

Climate Museum UK are collecting stories of extreme weather events across the globe, documenting real tangible and experienced shifts in our climate.

I recently submitted an article about the Nordic freeze that spread across Finland, Sweden and Norway over Christmas and New Year 2023.

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.