© NASA/Simoes Waves created by lightning flashes โ here shown in blue, green, and red โ circle around Earth, creating something called Schumann resonance. These waves can be used to study the nature of the atmosphere they travel through.
Lightning flashes in the skies above the Earth about 50 times every second, creating a burst of electromagnetic waves that circle around the planet's atmosphere.
Some of these waves combine and increase in strength, creating something akin to an atmospheric heartbeat that scientists can detect from the ground and use to better understand the makeup of the atmosphere and the weather it generates.
For the first time, scientists have detected this heartbeat - called the Schumann resonance - from space. This detection was surprising because the resonance was thought to be confined to a particular region of the atmosphere, between the ground and a
layer of Earth's atmosphere called the ionosphere.
"Researchers didn't expect to observe these resonances in space," said Fernando Simoes, a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "But it turns out that energy is leaking out and this opens up many other possibilities to study our planet from above."
Simoes co-authored a study on the detection of this resonance made by the U.S. Air Force's Communications/Navigation Outage Forecast System (C/NOFS) satellite.
How resonance worksSimoes explains the resonance phenomenon like this: Think of a playground swing. If you push the swing just as it hits the top of its arc, you add speed. Push it backwards in the middle of its swing, and you will slow it down.
When it comes to waves, resonance doesn't occur because of a swing-like push, but because a series of overlapping waves are synchronized such that the crests line up with the other crests and the troughs line up with the other troughs. This naturally leads to a much larger wave than one where the crests and troughs cancel each other out.
The waves created by lightning do not look like the up-and-down waves of the ocean, but they still oscillate with regions of greater energy and lesser energy.
These waves remain trapped inside an atmospheric ceiling created by the lower edge of the
ionosphere, which is filled with charged particles and begins about 60 miles (96 kilometers) up into the sky.
The resonance of the lightning-generated waves will only happen in a certain sweet spot where the wave is at least (or twice, three times, etc.) as long as the
circumference of Earth. This is an extremely low-frequency wave that can be as low as 8 Hertz (Hz) - some one-hundred-thousand-times lower than the lowest-frequency radio waves used to send signals to an AM/FM radio.
As this wave flows around Earth, it hits itself again at the perfect spot such that the crests and troughs are aligned, causing the waves to act in resonance and pump up the original signal.
A new toolWhile they'd been predicted in 1952, Schumann resonances weren't reliably measured until the 1960s. Since then, scientists have discovered that variations in the resonances correspond to changes in the seasons, solar activity, activity in
Earth's magnetic environment, in water aerosols in the atmosphere and other Earth-bound phenomena.
"There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of studies on this phenomenon and how it holds clues to understanding Earth's atmosphere," said study co-author and Goddard scientist Rob Pfaff. "But they're all based on ground measurements."
The C/NOFS satellite measured them from altitudes of 250-to-500 miles (400 - to-800 km). The team found the resonance showing up in almost every orbit C/NOFS made around Earth, which added up to some 10,000 examples.
While models suggest that the resonances should be trapped under the ionosphere, energy has been known to leak through. The findings meant the models will need to be tweaked to account for the leaky boundary, and also that there is a new tool for understanding the ionosphere as well as the
electric events in the atmosphere."Combined with ground measurements, it provides us with a better way to study lightning, thunderstorms and the lower atmosphere," Simoes said. "The next step is to figure out how best to use that tool from this new vantage point."
In this video, Nick Begich claims that the most empowered state of human consciousness corresponds with brainwave patterns of 7Hz to 8Hz, and that this is "the natural rhythm of the planet". Given that the Schumann resonance is 8Hz, perhaps there might be something to his assertion. [Link]
It might be interesting to build a shielded laboratory and power it using only AC electrical power at 8Hz to drive the DC PSUs that actually provide power to electronics (all running at hundreds of MHz to GHz, so those would have to be individually shielded too), and see what it can show us.
At about three times 8Hz or 25 frames per second, the human brain can't discern individual frames of motion pictures or video streams and translates them as continuous motion to the human mind, which is the basic trick of films and television.
I wonder what we might discover if we slow our technology down to match our natural frequency of perceptual abilities more closely.