From Russian Spacewalkers on ISS install experiment for monitoring seismic effects :MGmirkin wrote:A few links proffered by others in various threads relating to "magnetic flux ropes" / electric currents, re: magnetic reconnection (or alternatives thereto)...
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Regards,
~Michael Gmirkin
Wondering, what they meant with those "high-energy particle streams". Up to what we know by now these are changes in the current-density of the ionosphere that can be measured (in electrical terms the changing currents!) - as we do know that e.g. in case of the big tsunami in 2004 the "ionosphere moved about 40kms up and down over Sumatra"....After moving back to Strela, they moved a foot restraint from its boom to the exterior of Zvezda. They returned to Pirs, got an experiment called Vsplesk and moved with it to the large-diameter section of Zvezda.
There they installed the experiment, which monitors seismic effects using high-energy particle streams in the near-Earth environment. Then they installed cabling....
~Michael GmirkinTaipei - A Taiwan satellite recorded a sharp drop in ionospheric density above China's Sichuan Province before Monday's killer earthquake, verifying previous records that seismic activities affect ionospheric density, a newspaper said Friday. The China Times said that Taiwan's Formosa-3 satellite recorded that in the six to 15 days before the May 12 earthquake in Sichuan, the ionospheric density in the atmosphere about 1,000 square kilometres around Wenchuan, epicentre of the quake, was 1.2 million electrically charged particles.
On May 11, the eve of the quake, the ionospheric density over Sichuan had dropped by half to 600,000 charged particles.
Formosa-3 was launched by the Taiwan National Space Organization in 2006.
Since then, Formosa-3 has recorded ionospheric density after 63 earthquakes measuring magnitude 5 or above on the Richter scale, revealing a sharp drop in ionosphere density in 70 per cent of these cases.
An earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale hit Sichuan County, south-east China, at 2:30 pm on May 12.
The quake has killed more than 20,000 people and destroyed 500,000 homes.
UNDER THE OVAL: No solar wind? No problem. The skies over Baffin Island, Canada, can turn green even without a geomagnetic storm. These auroras appeared during a period of "quiet" on Oct. 15th:
"Last night, bathed in the glow of a full moon, the northern lights danced over Pangnirtung Fjord," reports photographer Claus Vogel. "It was a stellar night for shooting the aurora with my Nikon D700."
The display was sparked by nothing special. Baffin Island lies under Earth's auroral oval, a lopsided ring of light encircling the North Pole. Around the oval, Earth's magnetic field funnels electrically-charged particles from space into the upper atmosphere where the flurry of tiny impacts causes the air to glow green--no geomagnetic storm required.
Of course, a real storm is nice, too. Browse the gallery for examples:
BBC, Dec07: Spacecraft chases highest cloudsSky watchers in the northern hemisphere have snapped the first images of this year's noctilucent clouds – silvery blue structures that are the highest clouds to form in Earth's atmosphere. This season's crop of clouds could be the biggest in years due to the lull in the sun's activity.
"Noctilucent", or night-shining, clouds float dozens of kilometres higher than other clouds, at an altitude of about 80 km. Because of their height, they can be seen glowing before sunrise or after sunset as the sun illuminates them from below the horizon.
The clouds were first seen above polar regions in 1885, suggesting they may have been caused by the eruption of Krakatoa two years before. But in recent years the clouds have spread to latitudes as low as 40°, while also growing in number and getting brighter. The reason for the clouds' spread is unclear...
Although the average number of noctilucent clouds has been increasing in recent decades, their abundance also seems to rise and fall with the sun's 11-year cycle of activity. The clouds thrive when the sun is quiet and spews less ultraviolet radiation, which can destroy water needed to form the clouds and can keep temperatures too high for ice particles to form.
...Although amateur astronomers last week snapped photos of the Northern hemisphere's first noctilucent clouds of the season, AIM caught the first hints of the new cloud season the previous week, on 22 May. The hints came from the subtle dimming of sunlight passing through the Earth's atmosphere, Bailey told New Scientist.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandte ... space.html"These clouds are getting brighter with time, they're seen more often and also they're being seen at lower latitudes," said James Russell from Hampton University, Virginia, US.
Scientists believe that the shining clouds form at high latitudes early in the season and then move to lower latitudes as time progresses.The AIM science team is studying this new data to understand why these clouds form and vary, and if they may be related to global change.
Once the summer season ends in the Northern Hemisphere around mid- to late August, the Southern Hemisphere spring season starts about three months later in the period around mid- to late November. AIM will then be watching for shining clouds in the Southern Hemisphere from November through mid-March when that season ends.
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