Fire in the Sky

Coronal Mass Ejection Impact on Earth - In Progress Now

Space Weather
Fri, 05 Aug 2011 16:24 UTC

NASA's ACE spacecraft, which measures the speed of the solar wind just upstream of Earth, indicates that a CME impact on our planet is in progress. High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras in the hours ahead.

Update:
Analysts at the Goddard Space Weather Lab report a strong compression of Earth's magnetosphere in response to the CME impact. "Simulations indicate that the magnetopause separating magnetospheric and solar wind plasma is close to the geosynchronous orbit starting at about 19:20 UT on August 5th. Spacecraft [in these] orbits may be directly exposed to solar wind plasma and magnetic field."

Reader Comments

griffin · 2011-08-05T18:54:07Z

Good with the bad

The causal chain of solar activity doesn't end with sunspots, rather they are just the sources of coronal mass ejection (CME) events like this series that's happening now.

As the story mentions, CME's have one effect of compressing the Earth's protective electromagnetic sheath. And that's a good thing, from the standpoint of protecting the Earth from cosmic rays. The effect of compressing a volume proceeds by the inverse cube law, so the effect of even modest field diameter changes can be quite significant.

That satellites in geosynchronous orbits are endangered by the incoming avalanche of charged particles is merely an inconvenience.

Compression of the Earth's electromagnetic sheath and the corresponding increase in shielding from cosmic rays will help to mitigate recent global cooling due to cloud formation triggered by cosmic rays.

We need more solar activity like this, not less of it, if we are to escape another global climate cooling event lasting decades to centuries, or even another Ice Age - and those last for thousands of years.

So I, for one welcome sunspots and CMEs and the auroras they create. Paradoxically, the Earth (not human activity) seems to have created more heat in the recent past - the last 50 years or so - and now it needs to radiate that heat into space, not trap it and disrupt the jet streams or - heaven forbid - the Gulf Stream and Japanese Current, among other things, because shutting down those transfers risks development of unstable climate patterns, and possibly even a combination of oppressive summer heat - especially in the tropics - with really killing winter cold, mostly in the temperate, well populated areas.

griffin · 2011-08-05T19:06:26Z

Er, corrections

Well, it's complicated. Global warming leads to cooling, maybe, and it's really very complex, probably involves cosmic rays and their effect on cloud formation and heat trapping by the atmosphere, and we don't quite yet understand all of the mechanisms that are involved. Still, my intuition tells me that more sunspots and CMEs are very good things, at least to a point.

Atlas · 2011-08-05T20:41:09Z

also...

With these cme's hitting earth, isn't there a danger of earthquakes and volcanoes erupting?

griffin · 2011-08-06T01:34:30Z

What is the mechanism?

What is the mechanism? That is the question. How might the addition of a few hundreds or thousands of gigatons of hydrogen nuclei affect spiraling in at the poles affect the Earth's geological 'weather'? We do not know. Does it add energy to the global system or damp down the energy potential that already exists? Or do both with offsetting effects?

One suspects that McCanney's electric solar system theory might be helpful here, if investigated in all its ramifications, but we haven't done the theoretical or observational scientific work yet to figure it all out.

The Earth is an incredibly complex system existing in the context of a much larger and also complex star system, so merely saying that these are hard problems is an understatement.