For visiting World Cup fans and players, the biggest adjustment isn’t the weather so much, but perhaps the light

Light transcends weather. It’s predictable, it’s universal, and its influence on living things — on mood, on biology, on the rhythms of daily life — may be more profound than even the nor’easters and heat waves we pride ourselves on enduring here in New England.

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I just got back from Iceland, and I’m still not over it.

Yes, there were volcanoes and lava fields and breathtaking waterfalls, but what I can’t stop telling my friends about is the light. On my birthday, I went out on a midnight kayak trip, and on the way back to the hotel, I watched the sky do something I had never quite witnessed before — a slow fade, still bright enough that I could have been working in the garden, and then almost imperceptibly, a brightening. I had watched dusk turn to dawn in less than an hour. In mid-June in Iceland, the sun barely dips below the horizon before climbing back up. You lose track of time entirely. Midnight feels like late afternoon.

So when I landed back in Boston last week, the mat of green closed in around me, and for the first time in a week, I also experienced something I hadn’t really missed: actual nighttime.

I’ve been enjoying all the stories about fans pouring in from around the world for the World Cup. It got me thinking about who was going to experience the biggest difference — in weather, in landscape, in light. Especially the light. That’s where the real differences live, especially right now, right on the solstice. Wherever you are on Earth this weekend, the sun rises as far north of due east and sets as far north of due west as it ever will all year. But how dramatically you feel that depends entirely on your latitude.

Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, one of 16 host cities for the World Cup, has been drawing fans from places where June looks and feels nothing like a New England summer. For many visiting teams, the climate adjustment has been modest — France and Germany, for instance, share a latitude and seasonal profile not dramatically different from New England (although record heat in parts of Europe this weekend and next week will become a news story in itself). But for a few fan bases, the contrast is stark.

Worth noting first is that Foxborough is not Boston. Sitting roughly 30 miles inland, beyond the moderating reach of the Atlantic, Foxborough can run as much as 20 degrees warmer than the coast on a day when a sea breeze is keeping Boston comfortable. Flip that around after dark, though, and the clear summer nights cool faster inland than in the city, and evening air in the suburbs can actually be more comfortable than a muggy night on the Boston waterfront.

Back to the contrasts:

• Norway — Norway’s fans and players, sitting at nearly 60 degrees north latitude, are among the most displaced visitors in the entire tournament. Oslo in June means nearly 19 hours of daylight, with the sun not setting until after 10:30 p.m. and never fully going dark — sitting in nautical twilight all night long. Think about what the sky looks like here in New England 30 to 60 minutes after sunset, that deep blue glow on the horizon. In Oslo right now, that’s what it looks like all night, until the sun starts climbing back up again just after 2:30 in the morning.

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The light alone is a kind of jet lag that has nothing to do with time zones. And Norway’s landscape of fjords and open mountainous terrain makes New England’s wall-to-wall hardwood forest feel dense and enclosed. Temperature-wise, Oslo’s June highs average around 66 degrees, whereas Foxborough’s inland afternoons will run noticeably warmer.

• Scotland — Scotland’s fans, arriving from Edinburgh at 56 degrees north, face a similar light adjustment. At home, June evenings stretch past 10 p.m. They’re also coming from one of the cooler climates in this tournament — average June highs in the 60s — and have found Foxborough’s afternoons running noticeably warmer. Worth noting that climate change has brought temperatures into the 80s to even northern Scotland more frequently over the past few decades. Scotland’s open moors and treeless highlands make New England’s lush green density feel like a different world.

• Ghana — Then flip the script entirely, and look at Ghana. Accra, the country’s capital, sits just 5.6 degrees north of the equator, where the geometry of the Earth means the solstice is nearly irrelevant. Daylight there barely varies all year, hovering around 12 hours regardless of season because the Earth’s tilt affects equatorial regions so little. Ghanaian fans have been experiencing something genuinely unusual in Foxborough: nearly three extra hours of daylight compared to home. The sun is still up at 8 p.m., which, back in Accra, would mean it set two hours ago. And while Accra in June is hot and oppressively humid — highs between 80 and 85, with dew points consistently in the 70s, as humid as it ever gets here in New England, every single day — our summer air has actually felt like relief.

• Morocco — Morocco’s story is different again. Casablanca sits on the Atlantic coast at about 33 degrees north, so Moroccan fans recognize the coastal geography. But Casablanca in June is strikingly dry — nearly rainless, with low humidity and open skies. Despite a dry spring, our monochromatic green, which seems to envelop everything, might surprise. They’ve also gained about an hour of daylight compared to home.

I’ve lived in New England my entire career. We get used to the slow transition, season to season, the change in light barely perceptible at first — just a few seconds of gain or loss after the solstices, rising to just under three minutes a day near the equinoxes.

Sunday marks the summer solstice, and for native New Englanders, it’s the beginning of something else entirely — summer vacations, kids out of school, the school buses taking a couple of months off. For the fans and players here with us, they’re experiencing that moment too, whether they know it or not. For some, it will be closer to the sun’s maximum reach than they’ve ever experienced. For others, it may feel like the light has been stolen from them, and maybe a little disorienting — which I can appreciate. But from what I’ve seen of some of these fans (those Scots), I wonder if they even notice.

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