Watch The Northern Lights Live On The Web

A still image of what the aurora show will look like through the Slooh Space Camera during the live webcast. CREDIT: Slooh Space Camera

Light Show: Watch Auroras Live On Web -- Space.com

The sun has been causing a commotion lately, sending out a barrage of solar storms that have fired up Earth's auroras, to the delight of those who live in far northern latitudes. Now, with the help of a webcam in Alaska, those who live outside of the usual range of the northern lights will get a chance to watch their eerie dance.

The Slooh Space Camera, located outside of Fairbanks, Alaska, will be streaming live starting at 11:00 p.m. PDT (2:00 a.m. EDT) today, March 22 (06:00 UTC March 23), with astronomer Bob Berma on-site to commentate throughout the show.

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CSN Editor: The Slooh Space Camera website is here.

Fast Flip Of Earth's Poles

Possible evidence for the rapid reversal was in rocks formed from lava flows in Nevada's Sheep Creek Range. Credit: Scott Bogue

From New Science:

Volcanic rocks may record an unusually sudden magnetic field reversal.

Rocks may not talk, but they do tell tales. You just have to know how to read them.

A large rock formation near Battle Mountain, Nev., tells a dramatic story in the history of the Earth. You’d never guess if you saw the rocks because they look ordinary. But after studying minerals in those rocks, geologists report that 15 million years ago, the Earth’s magnetic field flipped: The north magnetic pole headed south, and it did so surprisingly quickly.

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Tsunamis Leave Ionosphere All Shook Up

Photo: Researchers hope measuring atmospheric waves will improve early warning of big tsunamis such as the one generated by a February earthquake in Chile.MARCELO HERNANDEZ/dpa/Corbis

From Nature News:

Progress of waves through open sea sends vibrations that magnify with height up the entire atmospheric column.

The signals of GPS satellites could be used to monitor tsunamis as they sweep across the ocean. In the most detailed study to date of the effect, scientists have shown that even though open ocean tsunami waves are only a few centimetres high, they are powerful enough to create atmospheric vibrations extending all the way to the ionosphere, 300 kilometres up in the atmosphere.

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Second Super-Fast Flip Of Earth's Poles Found

On the flip, in record time (Image: G.Glatzmaier/Los Alamos National Laboratory/P.Roberts/UCLA/SPL)

From The New Scientist:

SOME 16 million years ago, north became south in a matter of years. Such fast flips are impossible, according to models of the Earth's core, but this is now the second time that evidence has been found.

The magnetic poles swap every 300,000 years, a process that normally takes up to 5000 years. In 1995 an ancient lava flow with an unusual magnetic pattern was discovered in Oregon. It suggested that the field at the time was moving by 6 degrees a day - at least 10,000 times faster than usual. "Not many people believed it," says Scott Bogue of Occidental College in Los Angeles.

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Earth Raised Up Its Magnetic Shield Early, Protecting Water And Emerging Life

From Discover Magazine:

Here we are drinking coffee and tweeting and otherwise going about our lives, generally not giving much thought to the protection that the Earth’s magnetic field affords us from the solar wind. But that magnetic field is crucial for our existence. Now, new findings in Science say that this protective shield originated even 200 million years earlier than scientists had previously thought, perhaps protecting the planet’s water from evaporating away and aiding the rise of life on the early Earth.

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Shields Down! Earth's Mag Field May Drop In A Flash

There'll be little warning if Earth's magnetic field flips (Image: NASA/SPL)

From New Scientist:

EVEN if we knew precise details of Earth's core, we would not be able to predict a catastrophic flip in the polarity of its magnetic field more than a decade or two ahead.

Our planet's magnetic field has reversed polarity from time to time throughout its history. Some models suggest that a flip would be completed in a year or two, but if, as others predict, it lasted decades or longer we would be left exposed to space radiation. This could short-circuit satellites, pose a risk to aircraft passengers and play havoc with electrical equipment on the ground.

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As The World Churns: Earth's Liquid Outer Core Is Slowly 'Stirred' In A Series Of Decades-Long Waves

By combining measurements of Earth's magnetic field from stations on land and ships at sea with satellite data, scientists were able to isolate six regularly occurring waves of motion taking place deep within Earth's liquid core, with varying timescales. (Credit: NASA/JPL)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Dec. 28, 2009) — Most of the time, at least from our perspective here on the ground, Terra firma seems to be just that: solid. Yet the Earth beneath our feet is actually in constant motion. It moves through time and space, of course, along with the other objects in the universe, but it moves internally as well.

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North Magnetic Pole Moving East Due To Core Flux

Blue lines show Earth's northern magnetic field and the magnetic north pole in an artist's rendering. Picture courtesy Stefan Maus, NOAA NGDC

From National Geographic:

Earth's north magnetic pole is racing toward Russia at almost 40 miles (64 kilometers) a year due to magnetic changes in the planet's core, new research says.

The core is too deep for scientists to directly detect its magnetic field. But researchers can infer the field's movements by tracking how Earth's magnetic field has been changing at the surface and in space.

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Ancient Earth's Magnetic Field Was Structured Like Today's Two-pole Model

The well-exposed layering of basalt flows in formations near Lake Superior is aiding scientific understanding of the geomagnetic field in ancient times. Nicholas Swanson-Hysell, a Princeton graduate student, examines the details of the top of a lava flow. (Credit: Photo by Catherine Rose)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Oct. 3, 2009) — Princeton University scientists have shown that, in ancient times, the Earth's magnetic field was structured like the two-pole model of today, suggesting that the methods geoscientists use to reconstruct the geography of early land masses on the globe are accurate. The findings may lead to a better understanding of historical continental movement, which relates to changes in climate.

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The Shining: What We Still Have To Learn About The Northern Lights.

A typical Alaskan sky, photographed from Eielson Air Force Base, 25 miles southeast of Fairbanks, displays auroral structures and motions that scientists still find mystifying. (USAF/ Senior Airman Joshua Strang)

From Air & Space Smithsonian:

What first appeared almost an hour ago as a strange green cloud in the northeast has now spread across most of the sky near Alaska’s Poker Flat Research Range. Sheets of green light shimmer in front of the stars, waxing and waning, as electrons from the solar wind rain down through Earth’s atmosphere, colliding with atoms and creating the aurora. Here, watching the light show under a zillion stars, I get a strong, almost physical awareness of being on a planet—a planet orbiting a star and connected to it, despite the 93 million miles of space separating them.

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Auroras In Northern And Southern Hemispheres Are Not Identical

Asymmetric aurora. (Credit: Polar VIS Earth (J. B. Sigwarth) and IMAGE WIC (S. B. Mende))

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (July 24, 2009) — Norwegian researchers have shown that the auroras in the Northern and the Southern hemispheres can be totally asymmetric. These findings contradict the commonly made assumption of aurora being mirror images of each other.

The study was performed by PhD student Karl Magnus Laundal and professor Nikolai Østgaard at the Institute of Physics and Technology at the University of Bergen.

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Earth’s Magnetic Field Has Massive Breach - Scientists Baffled

(Click To Enlarge)

Watts Up With That:

I know. This sounds like a plot of a 1950’s scifi movie. But it is real. From my view, our localized corner of the solar system is now different than it used to be and changes in the magnetic interactions are evident everywhere. First we have the interplanetary magnetic field that took an abrupt dive in October 2005 and has not recovered since and remains at very low level:

Then we have the recent discovery that the ionosphere has dropped in altitude to unexpected and unexplained low levels.

We have a solar cycle 24 (driven by the solar magnetic dynamo) which can’t seem to get out of the starting gate, being a year late with forecasts for activity from it being revised again and again.

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Leaks Found In Earth's Protective Magnetic FieldI

A close-up of a solar flare taken with the Transition Region and Coronal Explorer (TRACE) spacecraft in Sept. 2005. Credit: NASA

From Live Science:

Scientists have found two large leaks in Earth's magnetosphere, the region around our planet that shields us from severe solar storms.

The leaks are defying many of scientists' previous ideas on how the interaction between Earth's magnetosphere and solar wind occurs: The leaks are in an unexpected location, let in solar particles in faster than expected and the whole interaction works in a manner that is completely the opposite of what scientists had thought.

The findings have implications for how solar storms affect the our planet. Serious storms, which involved charged particles spewing from the sun, can disable satellites and even disrupt power grids on Earth.

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Why Earth's Magnetic Field Flip-Flops

Earth's magnetic field may actually be two fields from separate sources. Credit: Dreamstime

From Live Science:

Every so often, Earth's magnetic field flips on its head, turning the magnetic North Pole into the South Pole and vice versa.

It last happened 780,000 years ago, and is predicted to occur again in about 1,500 years ... maybe. The overall frequency is hard to predict — there was one period in Earth's history when the field didn't reverse for 30 million years.

Why these flip-flops happen at all is a great riddle, but a new hypothesis on the origins of the magnetic field could shed light on the reason.

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Changes In the Earth's Magnetic Field

The innermost part of the earth. The outer core extends from 2500 to 3500 miles below the earth's surface and is liquid metal. The inner core is the central 500 miles and is solid metal. Credit: John Lahr, USGS Open-File Report 99-132

Sloshing Inside Earth Changes Protective
Magnetic Field -- Live Science

Something beneath the surface is changing Earth's protective magnetic field, which may leave satellites and other space assets vulnerable to high-energy radiation.

The gradual weakening of the overall magnetic field can take hundreds and even thousands of years. But smaller, more rapid fluctuations within months may leave satellites unprotected and catch scientists off guard, new research finds.

A new model uses satellite data from the past nine years to show how sudden fluid motions within the Earth's core can alter the magnetic envelope around our planet. This represents the first time that researchers have been able to detect such rapid magnetic field changes taking place over just a few months.

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