September 20, 2021 / Dr.Tony Phillips - NASA

Sept. 24, 2021: No solar storms? No problem. Earth has learned to make its own auroras. New results from NASA’s THEMIS-ARTEMIS spacecraft show that a type of Northern Lights called “diffuse auroras” comes from our own planet – no solar storms required.

Diffuse auroras look a bit like pea soup. They spread across the sky in a dim green haze, sometimes rippling as if stirred by a spoon. They’re not as flamboyant as auroras caused by solar storms. Nevertheless, they are important because they represent a whopping 75% of the energy input into Earth’s upper atmosphere at night. Researchers have been struggling to understand them for decades.

Above: Diffuse auroras and the Big Dipper,
photographed by Emmanuel V. Masongsong in Fairbanks, AK

“We believe we have found the source of these auroras,” says UCLA space physicist Xu Zhang, lead author of papers reporting the results in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics and Physics of Plasmas.

It is Earth itself.

Earth performs this trick using electron beams. High above our planet’s poles, beams of negatively-charged particles shoot upward into space, accelerated by electric fields in Earth’s magnetosphere. Sounding rockets and satellites discovered the beams decades ago. It turns out, they can power the diffuse auroras.

The video below shows how it works. The beams travel in great arcs through the space near Earth. As they go, they excite ripples in the magnetosphere called Electron Cyclotron Harmonic (ECH) waves. Turn up the volume and listen to the waves recorded by THEMIS-ARTEMIS:

Above: A great electrical circuit in space powering diffuse auroras. ECH waves were sonified by NASA’s HARP (Heliophysics Audified: Resonances in Plasmas) software.

ECH waves, in turn, knock other electrons out of their orbits, forcing them to fall back down onto the atmosphere. This rain of secondary electrons powers the diffuse auroras.

“This is exciting,” says UCLA professor Vassilis Angelopoulos, a co-author of the papers and lead of the THEMIS-ARTEMIS mission. “We have found a totally new way that particle energy can be transferred from Earth’s own atmosphere out to the magnetosphere and back again, creating a giant feedback loop in space.”

According to Angelopoulos, Earth’s polar electron beams1 sometimes weaken but they never completely go away2, not even during periods of low solar activity. This means Earth can make auroras without solar storms.

The sun is currently experiencing periods of quiet as young Solar Cycle 25 sputters to life. Pea soup, anyone?  [Note: Solar Cycle 25 is accelerating.  MS}

End Notes:

(1) Why do these electron beams exist? Earth’s magnetosphere is buzzing with energetic particles. Many of them are captured from the solar wind. When these particles strike the top of Earth’s atmosphere (the ionosphere), they dislodge electrons. Electric fields, which form naturally in Earth’s spinning magnetosphere, grab the liberated electrons and accelerate them skyward in collimated beams.

(2) Why don’t the beams ever go away? Short answer: because the solar wind never stops blowing. Even when the sun is quiet, Earth’s magnetosphere is jostled and energized by the ever-present solar wind. As a result, electrons are always being knocked off the top of Earth’s atmosphere as described in Note #1. Although solar storms are not required for this process, solar storms can help. For instance, when a CME strikes Earth’s magnetosphere, the contents of the magnetosphere become extra-energized. Lots of particles furiously strike the top of Earth’s atmosphere, liberating even more electrons than usual. Earth’s electron beams can thus become super-charged. When the storm subsides, the electron beams may weaken, but they never vanish because even the quiet sun produces solar wind.

References:

Zhang, X., Angelopoulos, V., Artemyev, A. V., Zhang, X.-J. (2021), Beam-driven ECH waves: A parametric study, Phys. Plasmas, 28, 072902, https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0053187

Zhang, X., Angelopoulos, V., Artemyev, A. V., Zhang, X.‐J., Liu, J. (2021). Beam‐driven electron cyclotron harmonic waves in Earth’s magnetotail. Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, 126, e2020JA028743. https://doi.org/10.1029/2020JA028743s

https://spaceweatherarchive.com/2021/09/20/earth-can-makes-its-own-auroras/

Kryon answers your questions:

QUESTION:
Dear Kryon, what can you tell us about the process of being born from the perspective of the other side of the veil?  What steps does the soul have to take to incarnate once again?

ANSWER:
It's a process so grand that you cannot conceive of it.  Remember, being a human is not your natural state!

So when you are 'Home', the journey of being born into Earth is like 'going to work' in the morning.  Sometimes it seems that your days are very short, but you go willingly and lovingly, in all appropriateness.

Even those who have the potential of an early death or of a tragic death go willingly and with joy.

Death is not seen as anything more than a transition ... opening one door and closing another.  Humanity is a grand experiment, and you can hardly wait to get 'back into the play'.

Now, I told you that you wouldn't understand it.  It's beyond the scope of your perception.

Take away time, distance and linearity and you have what you call heaven.  When you come to Earth, everything changes within what you 'think' is real.

Kryon of Magnetic Service
Through Lee Carroll

DNA India; 24 July 2021

Although STEVE is not an aurora, he has an aurora side-kick: the "picket fence." Evenly-spaced blobs of green light often appear alongside or underneath STEVE during geomagnetic storms. Alan Dyer photographed these specimens on March 13th:

"STEVE put on a great show, appearing first as the characteristic purple arc then developing green picket fence fingers rippling from east to west," says Dyer.
What are these green pickets? A team of researchers led by Toshi Nishimura of Boston University may have found the answer. Using data from NASA's THEMIS spacecraft, they pinpointed STEVE's power source. More than 22,000 km above Earth's surface, magnetic explosions called "substorms" hurl streams of hot plasma toward Earth. When the streams reach an altitude ~250 km above Earth's surface, they begin to emit a soft-purple light. This is STEVE.
The same explosions spray energetic electrons toward Earth. The electrons move even deeper into the atmosphere, all the way down to 100 km, where they ignite fingers of green auroras. This is the picket fence.
So when you see STEVE, look for his sidekick as well. Sometimes the picket fence appears first, so one can herald the other. Either way, it's a beautiful show.
www.spaceweather.com

Northern spring is less than a week away. That means hot ribbons of plasma are starting to flow in Earth's magnetosphere. Fred Hirschmann just saw one of them over Glacier View, Alaska:

"Just after midnight on March 12th I was feeding our outdoor woodstove when I recognized the long narrow band of STEVE overhead," says Hirschmann.
STEVE--short for "Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement"--was long thought to be a type of aurora borealis. But it's not. Auroras appear when particles rain down from space. STEVE, on the other hand, does not require "rain." Instead, satellite measurements show that it is a ribbon of hot (3000°C) gas speeding through the upper reaches of Earth's magnetic field faster than 10,000 mph. The ribbon's purple hue is still a mystery; some research suggests the color comes from heated nitrogen, but the jury's still out..
Studies show that STEVE appears most often in weeks around equinoxes--that is, now. If you live at high latitudes, be alert for purple ribbons in the sky.
www.spaceweather.com

Earth's orbit around the sun isn't a perfect circle, it's an ellipse. One side is closer to the sun (147.5 million km) than the other (152.6 million km). This weekend (Jan. 2nd), we're at the closest point, known to astronomers as perihelion. When Earth is at perihelion, the sun looks a little bigger than usual, as shown in this composite image from Khosro Jafarizadeh of Karaj, Alborz, Iran:

Jafarizadeh took the two pictures from opposite ends of Earth's orbit: perihelion and aphelion. Sunlight falling on Earth at perihelion is 3.5% stronger than the year-long average. Northern snow doesn't melt, however, because seasons are shaped primarily by the tilt of Earth's spin axis, not the eccentricity of its orbit.
www.spaceweather.com

The Siberian Times - Tue, 24 Nov 2020

A tranquil video of white and silver bubbles of methane caught in newly-formed ice was filmed at Maloye More, a strait that separates the lake's largest island of Olkhon from the western shore of Lake Baikal.

'Ice covering the shallow straits and bays begins to form by the end of November, while the rest of Baikal freezes by the middle of January.  'This kind of ice, the purest, can only be seen in some areas of the lake in November and December', said Stanislav Tolstev, 46, photographer and tour guide from Irkutsk. 'The first time I paid attention to these bubbles was about four years ago, then I learned to distinguish methane from air bubbles."

'Methane bubbles freeze in layers one over the other, and the floors of them can grow 1.5 metres (5ft) deep.  Local anglers say that other, smaller and more chaotic, bubbles are 'the breathing of Baikal seals' and point to the areas where these animals rise to the surface to take some air'.

Baikal is located in a rift zone which is a deep - in fact the largest on the planet - crack in the Earth's crust which narrows at depths of several dozen kilometres.  It does not have a solid bottom: instead there is a cushion of bottom sediments that has been filling the most narrow lower part of the crack for millions of years. These bottom sediments are similar to bogs in that they contain a lot of gas, including methane.

In deep winter, there are roads over the ice, but the larger methane bubbles pose a threat.  'There are areas of the lake where bubbles grow so big that cars fall through the ice,' he said. 'The location may vary from year to year, and usually the large bubbles appear starting from February and can be seen through March and April.'

Scientists monitor methane rising from the floor of Baikal, and while it is said to be increasing, they have disputed this is due to global warming.

More on this at : https://www.sott.net/article/444866-Beauty-of-frozen-methane-bubbles-on-the-worlds-deepest-lake-shown-in-stunning-video