Islands & Polar Regions
This group's seasons are driven to extremes by latitude: tropical islands divide into dry and wet seasons, swayed by trade winds and monsoons — travel in the typhoon/hurricane belts (northwest Pacific, July–October; Caribbean, June–November) requires checking official warnings; temperate islands (New Zealand's South Island, and island destinations beyond Tasmania) are at their best in their own summers. The polar regions keep another calendar altogether: the Arctic summer (June–August) is a sleepless season of midnight sun, when the icebergs of Svalbard and Greenland sail beneath it; from September to March the aurora season takes over, the night skies of Iceland, Tromsø, and Fairbanks performing in turn; Antarctica opens only in the brief summer from November to February, welcoming expedition cruises as penguin chick-rearing and iceberg sculpture take the stage in the same season.
Places and connections ↗