Cecilia Blomdahl can still remember the first time she looked out at the Arctic Ocean on a winter night. The darkness was so dense she could not tell where land started and ended.
It was 2015 and Ms. Blomdahl had arrived on Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago near the North Pole, to work at a restaurant with friends. Polar night had just begun, and the sun would not rise again until February. But the thing that really struck her, and has stayed with her ever since, was the quiet.
“I don’t think I understood then how this would become my home,” she said in a recent interview. “I was only planning to stay for three months.”
Now Ms. Blomdahl, 34, lives in a cabin overlooking a fjord with her partner, Christoffer, and dog, Grim. She lives in the town of Longyearbyen, population 2,400, where she has managed to bring the unique extremes of the 78th parallel north to an audience of millions on TikTok and YouTube.