Magnetism, migration, and the enduring mystery of aurora borealis
BY CHANDRA BROWN
In my mind, the aurora borealis is connected to love, to quiet places, to the way thick snow dampens acoustics at lofty latitudes.
When we were young, deep in our Alaskan winters, my parents would shake my brother and me gently from sleep and lure us into a dimly-lit living room with promises of late-night popcorn. Kneeling on the couch, my little brother would sidecar his small, flannel-clad body against mine, our bellies pressed against the cushions. And there, through the west-facing window, we would watch the northern lights, struggling against sleep to keep our eyes from blinking shut.
My early memories of the aurora are like this. Dreamlike, hypnagogic.
To see auroras, you have to be willing to be with the darkness — to let go of sleep, to go out into the night and be cold. Streetlamps, headlamps, headlights, and screens diminish or eliminate the chances of seeing them. If you don’t live in the north, it’s best to at least be facing north, and to seek them around midnight, near equinoxes or during solar eclipses.
The name itself, aurora, is a mouthful, requiring the speaker’s lips to take shapes uncommon to English phonetics. It comes from Latin, meaning “dawn” or, more romantically, “goddess of the dawn.” Borealis, also Latin, means “north,” and invokes the Greek god of the north wind, Boreas. The southern lights — the Southern Hemisphere’s analog to the Arctic northern lights — are called aurora australis, from auster, Latin for the “south wind.”
The root cause of aurora is magnetism. Attraction and repulsion: Opposite poles attract, while matching poles repel one another. Our Earth is a magnet. Molten iron and nickel churn through its outer core, stimulating electric currents that generate our magnetic field and maintain the Earth’s magnetosphere — the protective bubble that expands into space far beyond our upper atmosphere, shielding us from the sun’s fits and furies.
To begin to comprehend the northern lights, we start at the center of the sun, the center of our solar system, our gravitational anchor. Here, at the sun’s core, constant nuclear fusion expels energy as unfathomably intense light and heat. Stare a little longer at the sun— ill-advised as it is — and you’ll discover sunspots, contradictory places where anomalous cool temperatures create dark splotches on the sun’s surface, zones where energy is confused, charged, and chaotic.
The prevalence and intensity of sunspots is, like most things in our physical world, subject to cycles. A solar cycle restarts roughly every 11 years, when the sun’s magnetic field flip-flops, or swaps poles. Astronomers first recorded this pattern in the 18th century, stamping the period between 1755 and 1766 as Solar Cycle 1. We are currently in Solar Cycle 25, which began during solar minimum in 2019. We are now careening toward solar maximum. At solar maximum, the sun goes wild.
At solar minimum, the magnetic field around the sun is orderly and stout and has two distinct poles. As the solar cycle wears on toward solar maximum the field grows confused, tangly, with a mess of disorganized magnetized zones, and the lines of force at the sun’s surface get twisted up into knots. As a consequence of this chaos, the field gets weaker.
The knotted lines of force eventually snap, like fiery rubber bands, producing solar flares — massive explosions of light traveling so fast they can reach Earth, 93 million miles away, in approximately 8 minutes. Sunspots also trigger coronal mass ejections, flinging into space enormous clouds of plasma at upwards of 1,800 miles per second. These phenomena are collectively known as solar storms.
Coronal mass ejections make their own magnetic fields. When they strike the earth’s magnetosphere, the two fields engage, and floods of charged particles cascade along the Earth’s geomagnetic field lines toward the poles. At the poles, the field is weakest. This is where space art is made: Solar particles crash into the atoms and molecules in our upper atmosphere, and electrons are stripped away in the collision like shrapnel after an explosion. And when they recombine, reconnect, with other particles in the ionosphere, they make ethereal, exquisite splashes of light. It’s the reconnection that catalyzes the brilliance of the aurora.
I met my husband during an autumn defined by forest fire, smoke, and a full solar eclipse. We met on the Main Salmon River, in Idaho, and our love was unlikely, logistically problematic, and, also, magnetic — powered, as love is, by elements beyond our control.
Seven years after that eclipse summer, on May 10, 2024, we got married. We chose that date for its numbers: our shared height in feet and inches, the number of years he is younger than me, the number of days in April our birthdays are apart, the repeating multiples of two.
We chose to bring our people together in North Fork, Idaho, at a confluence where two stems of the Salmon come together. The wedding was to be an expression of collaborative art, we thought, a multi-day party to properly honor our people and our partnership.
For months over the winter, however, the spreadsheets, logistics, and outgoing checks layered awkwardly atop the rest of our lives. The tasks of wedding planning distracted me from my actual work and at times I resented it, thinking, “I am not this person.” I felt like I was planning for someone else, someone who didn’t mind participating in the wedding-industrial complex and for whom tablecloth-flower-bridesmaid color coordination was an actual priority. We tried our best to steer toward our own shared vision. We tried to corral the details and not let the minutiae turn into monsters. We worried about asking too much of our people, and spending too much money, and causing a sonic or cultural disturbance in the tiny community of North Fork.
I felt disconnected. I failed to write my vows until the pressure the morning of May 10 forced me to, and I wondered, critically, what this signified about my choice to marry Nate. But, despite these anxieties, we did it. And it was blurry and beautiful, and I’ve never felt so much love in one place, at one time.
After our ceremony, a friend joked that we’d planned the wedding around a geomagnetic storm. On an aurora app, our location lit up, and for a few magical hours, Alaska appeared in our Idaho sky: Constellations were replaced by shivering curtains of color, ethereal swaths of emerald with moments of electric violet.
“On an aurora app, our location lit up, and for a few magical hours, Alaska appeared in our Idaho sky: Constellations were replaced by shivering curtains of color, ethereal swaths of emerald with moments of electric violet.”
Nate and I stood with locked arms, watching the sky. The friends who had made it to 2 a.m. were scattered about, sprawled out on raft trailers, in the cobble, on stumps, their faces turned upward. I settled into my body for the first time in months. I landed on that piece of earth between rivers. My discomfort had been in the liminality, the building of the wave, the gathering of energies. On May 10, 2024, tides converged, polarity shifted. Powers beyond our control collided.
Colors of aurora are associated with altitude—distance from the earth’s surface—and the molecules that occupy various strata of our atmosphere. Red is associated with high-altitude atomic oxygen, the reconnection, or excitation, of molecules occurring more than 150 miles away. Green is excited atomic oxygen at mid-altitudes, between 60 and 150 miles above Earth. Blue or purple auroras are excited ionized molecular nitrogen, somewhere closer, below an altitude of 60 miles. In the strongest of auroral events, we can perceive even more colors like yellows, pinks, and white.
During especially forceful solar storms, particles can flow like waterfalls away from the poles, in the direction of the equator, across regions typically deprived of northern lights.
In May 2024, a sunspot named Active Region 3664 launched a record solar flare, the strongest so far in the current social cycle, releasing six coronal mass ejections that reached Earth’s magnetosphere on the afternoon of May 10. That night, aurora emanated from both poles. The impact was so powerful that people in Mexico saw an aurora for perhaps the first time in their lives.
Despite the violence that creates them, we perceive aurora to be mostly silent, too far away for our animal ears to register. It originates in the anacoustic ionosphere, between 50 and 300 miles above the surface of the Earth, where sound behaves much differently than it does down here. People across generations, however, have reported hearing the aurora whistle, or hiss, or crackle. But most of the world’s population lives distant from the poles; most people will never hear, let alone see, the aurora borealis or australis. For most people, aurora will remain a legend.
Space weather is a fusion of mystifying interconnected phenomena, powerful beyond our comprehension. The aurora is a physical manifestation of geomagnetic activity, an expression of the electric currents in the ionosphere that perturbate, or significantly disturb, the Earth’s magnetic field. In other words, the northern lights are gorgeous evidence of a massive disruption in the forces that govern and guide our lives here on Earth. And there are impacts.
Myriad scientific papers published in journals such as Space Weather and Advances in Space Research describe instances across history when geomagnetic storms have crippled civic infrastructure. These events coincided with magnificent auroral displays. In 1859, worldwide telegraph services were stunted; in 2003 the FAA was unable to supply planes with GPS navigational guidance for 30 hours; in 2022, during a rather mild space weather event, 38 of 49 freshly-launched Starlink satellites succumbed to orbital decay, burning up or crashing, disappointingly, back down to Earth.
As our technologies assume more prevalent and critical roles within our lives, our vulnerability to the impacts of space weather increases. Our power grids, radio communications, oil and gas pipelines, and GPS navigation are inarguably affected by solar activity — to say nothing of its effects upon spacecraft. Global blackouts could impair markets, communications, emergency services, trade, food distribution, water pumps, fuel pumps, climate control, and any other system that is powered by electricity. A 2017 study in the journal Space Weather asserted that, in the most extreme blackout scenario, 66 percent of the United States’ population would be impacted, and that the country would suffer an economic loss of $41.5 billion a day.
Animals who migrate — who build their lives around movement between homes, or between feeding and breeding grounds, or between the hunt and the hive, or between natal streams and the wide, wide ocean — are, as science is proving, impacted, too.
Starting in the late 1990s, a handful of physicists and evolutionary biologists began to investigate the link between geomagnetic storms and migratory anomalies — including honey bees, bats, and birds sent off-course, and mass strandings of whales. There’s a sadness in associating something so wondrous as the northern lights with entire communities of wayward animals, creatures sent adrift by disruption to their internal compasses, beings who create navigational maps with their bodies and the memories stored within them. Research published in 2020 by Duke biophysicist Jesse Granger and astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz showed that mass strandings of otherwise healthy whales were twice as likely to occur during days when the sunspot count was high, and that gray whales are four times more likely to strand on days when radio waves from the sun are strongest. In 2005, German researcher Klaus Heinrich Vanselow reported that his analysis of 291 years of data determined that of 97 sperm whale strandings in the North Sea, 90 percent happened during longer-than-average solar cycles, when there were higher, longer frequencies of solar storms.
Scientists theorize that solar storms may have two or more impacts on magnetic navigation. They might change the geomagnetic field itself, resulting in the relay of incorrect information and false orientation, or, they might affect the animals’ magnetic receptors (literally, the anatomical parts of animals that allow them to navigate), temporarily disabling their capacity to orient.
“Resisting love is like resisting space weather. Both forces are too supremely powerful to fear. We have no influence, no recourse, so it’s best to go outside, bravely, and witness the lights.”
Resisting love is like resisting space weather. Both forces are too supremely powerful to fear. We have no influence, no recourse, so it’s best to go outside, bravely, and witness the lights.
As with other big natural phenomena, the stories of the people around us will influence how we see auroras. Depending on the geography or culture you’re born into, your people might believe that auroras are sparks and snow kicked skyward by a firefox’s tail as she scampers across the Arctic. Or they are water sprayed from the blowholes of enchanted whales. Or they are the souls of deceased children. Or they are the dead in the heavens playing ball with a walrus skull. Or that they are fires ignited by the Creator as a reminder that he is thinking of the people on Earth. Or, maybe, they are ancestors come to visit, the colors forming a shimmering bridge between generations, a luminous source of connectivity across space and time.
How you experience auroras is also a matter of perspective. Where you are, physically, spatially, matters. The visual structure of aurora is, generally, parallel rays moving upward through the atmosphere. But perspective effects can produce illusions of spirals, dunes, curtains, or, as they appeared on our wedding night, a converging crown of striations pulsing toward a conical center—a volcanic crater ring, a halo, an apex, an opening.
There are openings in the science of auroras that leave room for magic and interpretation. Into these openings, I choose to place my grandmothers, beloved old dogs, and friends gone downstream.
Our wedding was, we believe now, never about our love in isolation. It was about the humans and landscapes and water and winds that brought and kept us together: the mycelial connectivity of a well-tended, beautifully flawed, complex community. The revelation that without the charged and tangly threads of relationship, without our dynamic constellations of people, we’d get nowhere. And if we tried to control love, to shrink from its chaos, the colors would be diluted.
Resisting love is like resisting space weather. Both forces are too supremely powerful to fear. We have no influence, no recourse, so it’s best to go outside, bravely, and witness the lights.
Chandra Brown is a Missoula-based writer, educator, and river guide. She is the founder and director of Freeflow Institute, which builds arts-based outdoor learning opportunities.
