NASA Spacecraft Make New Discoveries About Northern Lights

A fleet of NASA spacecraft, launched less than eight months ago, has made three important discoveries about spectacular eruptions of Northern Lights called
"substorms" and the source of their power.

NASA's Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms (THEMIS) mission observed the dynamics of a rapidly developing substorm, confirmed the existence of giant magnetic ropes and witnessed small explosions in the outskirts of Earth's magnetic field. The findings will be presented at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco in December.

The discoveries began on March 23, when a substorm erupted over Alaska and Canada, producing vivid auroras for more than two hours. A network of ground cameras organized to support THEMIS photographed the display from below while the satellites measured particles and fields from above.

"The substorm behaved quite unexpectedly," says Vassilis Angelopoulos, the mission's principal investigator at the University of California, Los Angeles. "The auroras surged westward twice as fast as anyone thought possible, crossing 15 degrees of longitude in less than one minute. The storm traversed an entire polar time zone, or 400 miles, in 60 seconds flat."

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Divers Find New Species in Aleutians

There are unknown creatures lurking under the windswept islands of the Aleutians, according to a team of scientific divers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

This summer, while completing the second phase of a two-year broad scientific survey of the waters around the Aleutian Islands, scientists have discovered what may be three new marine organisms. This year's dives surveyed the western region of the Aleutians, from Attu to Amlia Island, while last year's assessment covered the eastern region.

During the dives, two potentially new species of sea anemones have been discovered. Stephen Jewett, a professor of marine biology and the dive leader on the expedition, says that these are "walking" or "swimming" anemones because they move across the seafloor as they feed. While most sea anemones are anchored to the seabed, a "swimming" anemone can detach and drift with ocean currents. The size of these anemones ranges from the size of a softball to the size of a basketball.

Another new species is a kelp or brown algae that scientists have named the "Golden V Kelp" or Aureophycus aleuticus. According to Mandy Lindeberg, an algae expert with NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service and a member of the expedition, the kelp may represent a new genus, or even family, of the seaweed. Up to ten feet long, the kelp was discovered near thermal vents in the region of the Islands of the Four Mountains.

"Since the underwater world of the Aleutian Islands has been studied so little, new species are being discovered, even today," said Jewett. He adds that even more new species may be revealed as samples collected during the dives continue to be analyzed.

The organisms were found while surveying more than 1000 miles of rarely-explored coastline, from Attu to the Tigalda Islands. Logging more than 300 hours underwater, the divers collected hundreds of water, biological and chemical samples during 440 dives. Armed with underwater cameras and video cameras, the divers took hundreds of photographs and dozens of short movies of the creatures that inhabit the coast of the Aleutians.

According to Jewett, the scientists are reasonably sure that the kelp is a new species, but more work is being done to confirm that the sea anemone species are completely new to science. Correspondence with anemone experts has so far shown the anemones to be new species, but the analysis is ongoing.

During both years, the chief scientist on the project was Douglas Dasher, a water quality expert from the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation. The scientific team operated from the R/V NORSEMAN, a 108-foot vessel originally designed for crab fishing in the Bering Sea.

The dives were part of a broad health assessment of the Aleutian Islands and were sponsored by the Alaska Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program, also referred to as AKMAP. The program is funded by the Environmental Protection Agency and managed through a joint agreement between the ADEC and UAF.

Samples from the dives are being used to catalog biodiversity in the region, assess water quality and potential contaminants. According to Jewett, this is the first time the remote nearshore region of the Aleutian Chain has undergone an in-depth marine assessment.

Not immune from human impacts

The rugged and remote islands of the Aleutians are not immune to the reach of human activity, say scientists leading the expedition.

"Pollutants traveling through air and water pathways from temperate latitudes have been showing up in the area," says Jewett. "Debris and spills from World War II in the Aleutians have left their mark behind in unexploded ordinance and local sources of pollutants."

Scientists on the project are using water and tissue samples collected during the dives to gauge the impacts of human activity in the area. Samples are being tested for nutrient and oxygen levels in the water, acidity, temperature and radioactive chemicals left over from the underwater nuclear tests conducted at Amchitka Island between 1965 and 1971.

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Observatories to Examine Arctic Changes from Under the Ice

Researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) are venturing this month to the North Pole to deploy instruments that will make year-round observations of the water beneath the Arctic ice cap. Scientists will investigate how the waters in the upper layers of the Arctic Ocean—which insulate surface ice from warmer, deeper waters—are changing from season to season and year to year as global climate fluctuates.

The Arctic expedition is part of a multi-year, multi-institutional program to establish a real-time, autonomous Arctic Observing Network. The WHOI researchers will work out of the North Pole Environmental Observatory, a yearly research camp on the ice that is organized and led by the University of Washington’s Polar Science Center.

Arctic research specialist Rick Krishfield and engineering assistant Kris Newhall will lead the WHOI expedition this spring, deploying two autonomous ice-based observatories between 88° and 90° North. The observatories are similar in design to moored, open-ocean buoys, though they will be anchored to the ice instead of the seafloor.

The instruments will slowly drift with the natural movement of the ice while observing water properties in the top 800 meters of the Arctic Ocean. The buoys are designed to last three years, about the same lifespan as the ice floes that support them.

“The goal of the WHOI observing system is to document and understand annual change through sustained observations of the polar ice pack, the overlying atmosphere, and upper ocean water properties,” says John Toole, principal investigator for the project and a senior scientist in the WHOI Physical Oceanography Department. “Many climate models suggest the Arctic ice cover will melt within 50 years. We want to measure the changes in the water—particularly the layered structure of the ocean—in order to understand what mechanisms might lead the ice cap to melt from below. The impacts for the ecosystem, the regional and global climate, and for commerce would be enormous.”

A key element of WHOI’s contribution to the observing system is the ice-tethered profiler (ITP). Invented by Toole, Krishfield, and colleagues, the ITP climbs up and down a mooring string each day, detecting the temperature, salinity, and oxygen content at various points in the water column. The instrument sends data through the mooring wire to the surface buoy on the ice, which relays the data by satellite phone back to researchers in Woods Hole.

That data is made available to the science community and public within hours via the Internet. In the past, scientists have studied Arctic waters through expeditions on icebreakers and ice-locked ships, or by setting traditional moorings that had to be recovered after months or years of data collection. But few have tried to send Arctic Ocean data back in real time, year-round, for multiple years.

Six WHOI ice-based observatories have been tested in the waters north of Alaska over the past three years, and researchers are confident that they can take the ice-tethered profiler system all the way to the top of the world.

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Research Rocket Launches Through Pulsating Aurora

This morning, a NASA suborbital sounding rocket launched from Poker Flat Research Range into an aurora display over northern Alaska at 3:45 a.m. Alaska Standard Time, allowing researchers to gather more data about the power source behind pulsating auroras.

Marc Lessard of the physics department at the University of New Hampshire was the principle investigator for the experiment to investigate various aspects of pulsating aurora. The 662 pound experiment housed in the nose cone of a 65-foot Black Brant XII rocket arced above the atmosphere 408 miles above northern Alaska. Pulsating aurora is a subtle type of aurora that seems to blink on and off in large round patches.

Lessard's experiment, called ROPA (Rocket Observations of Pulsating Aurora), was complex even by rocket-science standards. It had a main instrument cluster, known as a payload, and three sub-payloads, which separated early after the rocket cleared the upper atmosphere at an altitude of 140 miles. Two of the sub-payloads had their own rocket motors, propelling them away from the main payload where they obtained measurements of the pulsating aurora, which occurred near the latitude of Toolik Lake on Alaska's North Slope. Dirk Lummerzheim of the University of Alaska Fairbanks' Geophysical Institute was on the ground at Toolik Lake. During the launch, he identified what looked like pulsating aurora in the all-sky camera at the research station there.

Researchers from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia were looking at data from the launch as soon as it was available, before 5 a.m. Alaska Standard Time. Scientists think pulsating auroras get their power from the Van Allen belts, radiation belts far from Earth. Lessard's team also used the rocket to measure electrical current flow related to pulsating auroras and to produce visual images from within the pulsating aurora.


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