Every year, in the northern hemisphere, the summer solstice takes place between June 20 and 22. This year the solstice falls on Thursday, June 21, 2018. As the longest day of the year, it is the tipping point of shorter days and longer nights.
As solstices happen twice annually, the winter solstice is between December 20 and 22.
Over the course of human history, the summer solstice has held a variety of cultural and religious meanings. Some religions including celebrated it as a feast day and day for celebrations. As time has gone on, these celebrations have begun to dwindle, but the summer solstice is still something worth celebrating.
I won’t make the longest day of the year longer by explaining why it’s the longest day of the year. We’ll save the science for winter solstice, but the let’s take a look at an interesting study about summer solstice and mood swings.
Enter social media. In 2011, a group of researchers decided to look at the tweets of some 2.4 million people from all over the world, from February 2008 to January 2010, selecting 400 tweets at random from each Twitter user. They wanted to see if people’s mood changed with the time of day, the day of the week, and the season.
They found meaningful differences in all of these areas. But when it came to seasonal mood swings, they discovered something surprising. It was not the absolute amount of daylight but the relative change in that daylight that mattered most.
Which means if today’s daylight is longer than yesterday’s daylight, people are happier. When the change in daylight was positive, when approaching the summer solstice, people were significantly happier than they did when that change was negative, or approaching the winter solstice.
So it’s only natural that the culmination of half a year of good mood results in some kind of fireworks.
In New York on the summer solstice, the sunrise will be at 5:25 AM, and sunset will occur at 8:31 PM.
Beer on the rooftop is in order.
When Is Summer Solstice 2018? When Is The Longest Day of the Year?
