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Northern lights dancing in East Kootenay skies | Columbia Valley, Cranbrook, East Kootenay, Elk Valley, Kimberley, Ktunaxa Nation – E-Know.ca
The Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has issued a G3 (Strong) Geomagnetic Storm Watch for October 30/31, following a significant solar flare and Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) from the sun that occurred around 11:35 a.m. EDT on Oct. 28.
“Analysis indicated the CME departed the Sun at a speed of 973 km/s and is forecast to arrive at Earth on October 30, with effects likely continuing into October 31. When the CME approaches Earth, NOAA’s DSCOVR satellite will be among the first spacecraft to detect the real time solar wind changes and SWPC forecasters will issue any appropriate warnings,” SWPC stated.
“Impacts to our technology from a G3 storm are generally nominal. However, a G3 storm has the potential to drive the aurora further away from its normal polar residence and if other factors come together, the aurora might be seen over the far northeast, to the upper midwest, and over the state of Washington.”
So be prepared for a major sky show tonight and tomorrow, with clear sky conditions forecast. And you might want to consider shutting off electronic devices to be on the safe side the next 24 hours.
Rick Nowell, Physics Lab Tech at College of the Rockies, was busy earlier this month capturing the beautiful, ethereal sky dance of the Northern Lights that were on full, glorious display.
“The Northern Lights were visible over the East Kootenay on Monday, October 11 and early Oct. 12. This was due to a M 1.6 class solar flare on Oct. 9 that sent a coronal mass ejection that hit Earth on Oct. 12, triggering a G2 solar storm. They were bright enough to be seen in Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton. Americans reported seeing it as far South as Iowa, Minnesota and Ohio,” Nowell said.
“Hints of the aurora started around 10 p.m. and it slowly built up as a glowing gray band along the northern horizon. The NOAA space weather site showed a solar storm warning with a strong Kp=6 on the index scale. [The Kp index levels range from a quiet 0 to an intense 9.] It was worth driving out to a dark area near Wasa to check it out. By midnight it showed as two bright horizontal bands to the north horizon (as in the photo above) steadily brightening into a greenish glow and climbing above the Big Dipper stars.
“At 12:20, it suddenly broke up into bright green checkerboard patches and discharged as moving glowing spikes and curves to the northeast over Mt Bill Nye. Visibly you could see the pale green moving “flames” with reddish tints at their base. These rotated as two long cylindrical curtains: an inner brighter one rotated right, while a larger cylinder rotated left outside of it,” Nowell related.
Above video: Moving green flames over Mt Bill Nye to the Northeast with crimson at the base. This is an animated GIF with 12 frames from a small video AuroraNik_720x480 (attached).
The bright discharge subsided to a dim green glow after ten minutes, but four hours later reappeared as bright spikes (at 04:43 am MDT) as shown here in an animated GIF using frames from the college Meteor Cam.
“The aurora was bright and moving fast enough for video. The video above shows one minute of the green flames moving over Mt. Bill Nye. Video can be grainy and dim for low-light displays like this. Normally you would set the camera on a tripod and take time-exposures of around two to six seconds at 3200 ISO for each photo. Except the aurora curtains were moving too swiftly for that. The problem is, HD-1080 video is taken at 24 frames/second, so your exposure time is too brief, just 0.04sec per frame. But here I’m using a fast f/1.8 wide-angle 28mm lens which gathers a lot of light, and using 6400 ISO on the camera, which helps brighten it. It is still grainy and dim, my eye saw it brighter than the movie,” Nowell explained.
“The Northern Lights haven’t been very active the past few years. This was the first widespread occurrence. The sun has an 11-year cycle of quiet and noisy periods. We just passed the “minimum” from 2019 to April 2020. We should see more occurrences now, with max activity predicted for July 2025. For more info.
Nowell provided e-KNOW with more details about recent solar flare activity.
THE CAUSE: Solar flares that send ionized hydrogen blowing out from the Sun’s corona, containing protons and electrons. After a few days this hits the Earth and is funnelled into the Earth’s magnetic field lines at the North and South poles. It corkscrews down, and where the magnetic field lines get close together, bounces back from just above the atmosphere, around 57-63 degrees north latitude. Then it corkscrews back up again and bounces back and forth. More charge accumulates and pushes the magnetic field lines further and further apart, (it also creates a huge “ring current” circling the Earth which distorts the Earth’s magnetic field) and the charges speed up and come lower down, until the electrons and protons finally spray out along curving lines, and escape into the ionosphere at about 80 to 200 km high to collide with oxygen and nitrogen in the air.
COLOURS SEEN: The green and red glow from aurorae are jumps of electrons in oxygen atoms high in the atmosphere. The bright green that is most often seen, occurs from oxygen between 80 to 100km high. These are quick transitions, lasting 1/3 of a second, and bright. The dim red above the green auroral curtains (above 200 km) is also produced by oxygen atoms jumping from the excited state left over from the transition above and ending up in the “ground-state,” oxygen’s normal resting place. This transition is a slow event, taking around 104 seconds to complete and dim to see.
Lead image: During a strong aurora, nitrogen gas is hit hard enough by electrons to glow blue between the red and green layers and to glow crimson along the bottom edges of the curtains at 80 km. Here is an example showing the blues from May 2016. Facing north from Fernie, the constellation Cassiopeia above. Sasha Prystae (of Kimberley) photo
e-KNOW
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The artwork and publicity materials showcasing a giant salmon that lived five million years ago were ready to go to promote a new exhibit, when the discovery of two fossilized skulls immediately changed what researchers knew about the fish.
Initial fossil discoveries of the 2.7-metre-long salmon in Oregon in the 1970s were incomplete and had led researchers to mistakenly suggest the fish had fang-like teeth.
It was dubbed the “sabre-toothed salmon” and became a kind of mascot for the Museum of Natural and Cultural History at the University of Oregon, says researcher Edward Davis.
But then came discovery of two skulls in 2014.
Davis, a member of the team that found the skulls, says it wasn’t until they got back to the lab that he realized the significance of the discovery that has led to the renaming of the fish in a new, peer-reviewed study.
“There were these two skulls staring at me with sideways teeth,” says Davis, an associate professor in the department of earth sciences at the university.
In that position, the tusk-like teeth could not have been used for biting, he says.
“That was definitely a surprising moment,” says Davis, who serves as director of the Condon Fossil Collection at the university’s Museum of Natural and Cultural History.
“I realized that all of the artwork and all of the publicity materials and bumper stickers and buttons and T-shirts we had just made two months prior, for the new exhibit, were all out of date,” he says with a laugh.
Davis is co-author of the new study in the journal PLOS One, which renames the giant fish the “spike-toothed salmon.”
It says the salmon used the tusk-like spikes for building nests to spawn, and as defence mechanisms against predators and other salmon.
The salmon lived about five million years ago at a time when Earth was transitioning from warmer to relatively cooler conditions, Davis says.
It’s hard to know exactly why the relatives of today’s sockeye went extinct, but Davis says the cooler conditions would have affected the productivity of the Pacific Ocean and the amount of rain feeding rivers that served as their spawning areas.
Another co-author, Brian Sidlauskas, says a fish the size of the spike-toothed salmon must have been targeted by predators such as killer whales or sharks.
“I like to think … it’s almost like a sledgehammer, these salmon swinging their head back and forth in order to fend off things that might want to feast on them,” he says.
Sidlauskas says analysis by the lead author of the paper, Kerin Claeson, found both male and female salmon had the “multi-functional” spike-tooth feature.
“That’s part of our reason for hypothesizing that this tooth is multi-functional … It could easily be for digging out nests,” he says.
“Think about how big the (nest) would have to be for an animal of this size, and then carving it out in what’s probably pretty shallow water; and so having an extra digging tool attached to your head could be really useful.”
Sidlauskas says the giant salmon help researchers understand the boundaries of what’s possible with the evolution of salmon, but they also capture the human imagination and a sense of wonder about what’s possible on Earth.
“I think it helps us value a little more what we do still have, or I hope that it does. That animal is no longer with us, but it is a product of the same biosphere that sustains us.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 24, 2024.
Brenna Owen, The Canadian Press
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A new paper says a giant salmon that lived five million years ago in the coastal waters of the Pacific Northwest used tusk-like spikes as defense mechanisms and for building nests to spawn.
The initial fossil discoveries of the 2.7-metre-long salmon in Oregon in the 1970s were incomplete and led researchers to suggest the fish had fang-like teeth.
The now-extinct fish was dubbed the “saber-tooth salmon,” but the study published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS One today renames it the “spike-toothed salmon” and says both males and females possessed the “multifunctional” feature.
Study co-author Edward Davis says the revelation about the tusk-like teeth came after the discovery of fossilized skulls at a site in Oregon in 2014.
Davis, an associate professor in the department of earth sciences at the University of Oregon, says he was surprised to see the skulls had “sideways teeth.”
Contrary to the belief since the 1970s, he says the teeth couldn’t have been used for any kind of biting.
“That was definitely a surprising moment,” Davis says of the fossil discovery in 2014. “I realized that all of the artwork and all of the publicity materials … we had just made two months prior, for the new exhibit, were all out of date.”
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April 23 (UPI) — SpaceX launched 23 Starlink satellites into low-Earth orbit Tuesday evening from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
Liftoff occurred at 6:17 EDT with a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket sending the payload of 23 Starlink satellites into orbit.
The Falcon 9 rocket’s first-stage booster landed on an autonomous drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean after separating from the rocket’s second stage and its payload.
The entire mission was scheduled to take about an hour and 5 minutes to complete from launch to satellite deployment.
The mission was the ninth flight for the first-stage booster that previously completed five Starlink satellite-deployment missions and three other missions.
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