A Blog of Personal Thoughts
Miracle of the Planet
November 2024
Some days I take life for granted. I fail to listen to the birds. I don’t smell the snow or spruce or salt water, summer’s flowers, or the dryness of the forest. But when I get down to the beach and open area, circle to look at the snow-covered mountains, stand in the waves as they break against the sandy beach, the miracle of the planet occurs. What a remarkable place to live. In autumn, winter, and spring the aurora is another miracle. The wonder of a sky, absent of man-made light, full of stars on a moonless night, heavens that dance in the sway and colors of reds, greens, yellows, whites, and blues. I call such a nighttime vista ribbons in the sky.
If you have never seen an aurora, imagine a rainbow. Intensify it, backdrop the rainbow against a black sky. Look at the colors. Now start undulating it in separate waves or flashes that snake or whip across the sky. Or imagine a colored glow that changes the sky from its darkness to green or white or, if you're very lucky, the crimson of a sunset or rise.
Some Alaskan Natives believe that if you whistle, the lights will come down to get you. Another group says that they are the spirits of those who have died and reached the highest level of heaven, the level where there is no snow and only brightness. There are some common circumpolar traditions shared by the natives of those areas—the Eskimos of Alaska, Inuits of Canada and Greenland, the Samis of Scandinavia and Russia—that the lights are the spirits of those who died a violent death of childbirth, suicide, or murder; it is their blood that makes the aurora. Others say the movement represents spirits playing ball. Some cultures say the northern lights are a game of soccer with a walrus head, complete with tusks. A European legend said battles were fought in the skies. Some thought the aurora were torches held by spirits to light the way to heaven. Finnish and Estonian legends say a whale's tail has slapped the ocean and the spray rose to color the heavens. The Hebrideans thought the red stones of their islands were that color from the blood of heavenly battles, thus the name bloodstone.
Galileo first used the term boreale aurora to describe the northern lights. Captain James Cook first saw and documented the southern lights on his journey to Antarctica from 1772 to 1775 and named them aurora australis.
Early explorers of the aurora borealis examined events that became the beginning of the scientific exploration of the aurora. Hiorter studied the movement of a magnetic needle for 6,638 hours—now that's inductive science—and noticed a correlation with the northern lights. In 1768, Wilcke noted the lights and magnetism aligned similarly.
Humboldt used inductive science to great advantage. Around 1805, he and an assistant observed a magnetic needle every half hour for thirteen months. Like Hiorter, Humboldt also observed the aurora at times of magnetic disturbance. The Russians further enhanced the use of inductive research by setting up similar observation stations from St. Petersburg to Pekin (Beijing).
Later, Humboldt said "Observations are not really interesting except when we can dispose their results in such a manner as to lead to general ideas." I agree but without those lovely thousands of hours of observation, we would have no foundation for the general idea.
American George Kennan, charged at 23 with laying the telegraph cable across the Bering Strait and Siberia, led an expedition that intrigues me. Kennan's auroral description in Tent Life in Siberia is perhaps the best in literature or science.
The rapid alternations of crimson, blue, green, and yellow in the sky were reflected so vividly from the white surface of the snow, that the whole world seemed now steeped in blood, and then quivering in an atmosphere of pale, ghastly green, through which shone the unspeakable glories of the mighty crimson and yellow arches. But the end was not yet (pp. 333-334).
Delving into the science of the aurora, we know it is a giant electrical charge that occurs 50 to 70 miles above the earth and sometimes as high as 240 miles. This means to "drive" to the bottom of them would take an hour, and to the top an additional three hours. They are above the ozone layer, above the average height of meteor tracks and are 8 to 20 times farther away from sea level than the top of Mt. Everest and the bottom of cumulonimbus clouds.
Research from the University of Moscow in 1963 first told of the auroral oval that hovers over the north and south poles, and the earth circles between these auroras. Research from the University of Alaska and Los Alamos as recently as 1967 informed us the northern and southern lights are mirror images of one another.
How does this light happen? Where does this energy come from? Born of the sun, it is always present, at least to polar bears or penguins. Because the rotation of the sun is 27 Earth days beyond 30 degrees latitude, the auroras borealis and australis have a 27-day cycle. Sunspots, and the solar flares which they cause, occur on their largest scales in 11-year cycles. Thus, one season of fall, winter, and spring every 11 years, we see the most profound auroral displays. A great mass of red, the blood red aurora, indicates an intense sunspot. While it takes the light of the sun only eight minutes to come to Earth, it takes the sunspot's visual image two days to journey to our auroral atmosphere. Atmospheric gasses and the magnetic field by the poles cause the presence of the aurora. Molecules and atoms bounce off atmospheric interference, thus creating auroral light. It is these molecular and atomic collisions which cause the colors—nitrogen produces the reds and blues, oxygen the reds and greens.
All of us, at some point in our education, have seen or done a simple scientific experiment with a straight magnet, iron filings, and a piece of paper. Set a magnet on a flat surface and lie a sheet of paper on top. Gently sprinkle the iron filings on it. They will lay in curved lines on the paper on the sides from one end of the magnet to the other, with more collecting in the arc at each end. Now let your imagination add color and movement to these curves and you have an image of an aurora.
The most spectacular part of the aurora is the breakup, for it is then the colors change and move the most as the electrical energy dissipates. This breakup causes a flow of colors and light in discrete arcs and bands, or sometimes patches and rays. A corona emanates from the zenith and a veil covers the sky in a glow of one color, most commonly white and, perhaps once in a person's lifetime, red. Other times the aurora moves rapidly with rhythmical change like a breeze-blown ribbon. The auroral pulsation often moves fields of colors with no periods of darkness separating the dancing display.
My mother taught me to watch the northern lights. Perhaps they are the spirits of the dead in ethereal clothes of color, like my mother's silk chiffon, tea-length dress from Paris.…a dark blue georgette hand-painted in rust and gold. The gossamer dress has a dark blue silk under-slip and a 1920s long, flowing, banded headscarf, also of dark blue georgette silk with the hand-painting, that flows past the fingertips. It is a most stunning creation which I'm sure she bought with unique impulsivity. I don't know if she ever wore it, but it lay my entire childhood in tissue in the bottom drawer of the Alden family bureau, my bureau in my bedroom, in the company of her cream silk crêpe blouse she wore the day she married my father. And the flow of these delicate gossamer silk materials still creates for me the wavy images of the aurora borealis.
In the early 1950s, there was a winter of fantastic displays. We lived in Maine and each winter night when the sky danced, my mother woke me and we stood leaning our arms at almost shoulder height against the cabinets, staring out the north windows at the performance. These windows were about four feet high and extended the full length of the hall and stairway, perhaps 20 feet. It was an odd set of apartments. Where most buildings have the height of the pitch in the center, these had a deep depression and the roofs seemed wings that flared into the northern sky. All the better to see the aurora borealis for there was no roof overhang above. In the black sky we saw pulsating bands vibrating this way and that, the wavy bands of ribbon candy in yellow, white, green, red, blue, violet. One night she woke me and we watched a diffuse white one. It filled the sky, it waved back and forth. After watching it for about 20 minutes, she announced, Oh, this is boring. Let's go back to bed. She had become inured to brilliant colors that moved, and did not wish to waste her time on white. I still found it amazingly beautiful. As I returned to bed any of these nights, I undulated my way back to a deep sleep.
We watched discrete bands, arcs, folds, draperies, ribbon candy in all sorts of colors, candle flames of color shot through with a breeze as if from an open window. It was during this time that one night we saw an all-red aurora—that once in a lifetime occurrence. Another night, red and green flames of color shot through the midnight like an open fire. They came down, took our souls, tied them together. Beauty was one thing my mother enjoyed immensely. All of it, all of it, a miracle. Then one day a couple of years ago when I was at the beach with the treeless, unlimited sky, I saw another red aurora. I knew how honored I was to see two in my lifetime.
I like the remark Robert Peary made in 1910: "It always is a pity to destroy a pleasant popular illusion: but I have seen auroras of a greater beauty in Maine than I have ever seen beyond the Arctic Circle."
My son, Seth, and I saw a discrete aurora at West Fork of the Dennison on a Yukon-Alaska trip. One curved band of very pale green inched over the hill out of the north into a question mark without its dot. Six more green question tops gradually followed. As they moved from the north to fill the sky, these questions curved to crescents that hung from zenith to southern horizon. Finally, they became nine auroral curtains that rested briefly in the sky at West Fork just over the Canadian border, Alaska side. When we crawled in our sleeping bags, the moon shone on the river and an owl hooted. In the morning, Seth said, Wake up Mom. We need to leave. It’s snowing. How do you know it’s snowing, I asked. I can hear it, he replied. Unzipping our way out, snow covered the river and tent.
I saw the black aurora my first winter here. At first, I wondered if it were the negative after-image of the white light. What it is, however, is an absence of aurora in an otherwise sky-filled, pale and subtle, white auroral veil. Neil Davis, auroral scientist at University of Alaska at Fairbanks, says it is an excessive positive charge during the negative electricity of the northern lights.
I've seen the corona, that crown of light that emanates from the zenith to envelop all my world. I've seen the whole sky ablaze, hardly knowing where to turn to look next. The night at Eric and Tania's in September 1998 came the closest to the Maine auroras I watched as a child. The colors were Crayola Crayon intense as well as pale. What made that September evening unique for me in Alaska was the intensity of color and the aurora filling the entire sky. North shot brilliant-edged thin ribbons in curved, sudden waves of red, violet, orange, pink, yellow, green from the zenith to the northern horizon in seconds. Simultaneously, the South waved gentle whites and pastels, glowed so brilliantly in pale yellow I expected to see the sun rise at 8:30 in the evening, due south.
One night as I walked in the crisp evening to a friend’s, I saw a round auroral display. Red circles, white circles. My eyes are deceiving me; this cannot happen. A blue one appeared. Too patriotic, I thought. I must be hallucinating. Another blue one. A white one disappeared, then a red one. Always round, never an ellipse or an oval. The next day, I saw a 10-year-old friend. Did you see the aurora last night? Yes, Delphine replied, I’ve never seen circles before. An affirmation of normal, of scientific observation without contacting the center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Twice I lay outside. One night, I put the cot in the back of the pickup and lay on it for an hour watching the aurora borealis—white with black shadows and pale blue bands of movement. I'd never seen either of those before. In response to the pale blue, I heard an A minor chord and to the aurora, Liszt's fourth Transcendental Étude, Mazeppa. One spring morning, I awoke in the still-dark hours and went out to lie on our deck. I put feather pillows under and a blanket over me. As I lay there warm and comfortable watching the stars and wisps of a pale aurora, I smelled a strange odor. I can only liken it to the distant smell of a coffee plant in New York or Kansas City. That stale burnt and acrid coffee odor that seems to come from several blocks away. This odor was even more faint, yet in fact its source was quite close. I held my breath to lie more still. I heard nothing, not one leaf, twig, or step, but continued to watch the stars and aurora…and to smell the faint, stale odor of a black bear not far away.
I think it is the auroras and ice skating that indelibly tie me to the north. I like to skate the white earth, fasten my dreams and skate on ribbon candy, fly in and out among the colored draperies of my mother's silk dress. Some night when it is cold and the ice is clear, I shall leave my warm bed and go skate under the aurora. Some clear winter night, I shall skate the post office pond as the aurora dances. Sometimes during a seizure I feel I am an aurora.
To see some photographs of auroras, look at https://www.seanneilson.com. To see some in action, you can find moving images on YouTube.
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