If you want to see Etna’s eruptions and lava, you must wait because Etna is sleeping now. Her last activity was in September 2004. You can watch for news of Etna at this web site that offers volcano tours, scroll to the far right where it says: “Latest news”. Sometimes the INGV has their webcam interface working, which would be a better source to check (presently, it is not functioning). To check the INGV webcam, go to the INGV page. From the “Rete di telecamere” part where you see Etna, Stromboli, an Vulcano, put the mouse over the word “Etna” and you’ll have a popup/hierarchical menu, choose the location and then Webcam (for example: “Cuad visible/WebCam”).

If you want to hike up an active volcano, Stromboli is active all of the time, sometimes more active than other times. It’s a hard but short hike to the top and from that position you have the advantage to look vertically and down towards the crater. There are many guides one can hire in Stromboli town, which might be recommended for the first time, especially at night, when the volcano eruptions are easiest to see. During the high activity times they close off the top, but I think it is open now. For border and historical reasons, the Guardia di Financia are the people who patrol the volanoes, they are easy to recognize with their freshly pressed uniforms. When access to the Stromboli top is forbidden, if you are caught, the Guardia di Finanzia can fine you a few hundred euros, so if you want to try anyway, wait until a soccer match, and the Guardia di Finanzia will likely be on the other island: Lipari, watching the game.

Denis

With Etna, the danger to people is (usually) its imposing characteristics as a high and large mountain (mountaineers make lots of mistakes) than its characteristics as a volcano. I had an accident hiking down the mountain that night that had nothing to do with the volcano/lava but everything to do with the fact that my companion took my flashlight and I couldn’t see my feet and the trail and fell down the hillside of an old extinct cindercone.

Plato: you need someone with a lot of spare time to read and analyze all of that (and the topic is sufficiently out of my area that my time investment would be large). I’m sorry I cannot comment.

One more question if I may? If you click on “name” I have been doing some thinking here.

Any corrections that you may see?

I see the connection now with Solar flares, sun’s polar flips, the Solar Max of 2011 and 2022, respectively.

These fields provide a measure of extra protection for trips to the Moon and Mars, dropping cosmic ray fluxes in the biologically dangerous energy range 100 MeV to 1000 MeV by 30% or more. Mission planners of the future might actually schedule long trips through the solar system to coincide, roughly, with Solar Max, thus taking advantage of this decline in cosmic rays.

For interstellar dust coming into our solar system, the particles are focused now, instead of deflected away from the inner solar system. It takes about 10-20 years for dust particles to travel from the heliosphere edge to our inner solar system, anyway, but in about 5 years after the flip, (i.e. approximately now), at the Earth, we should start seeing an increase in the number of interstellar dust particles detected.

I commented that ‘no complaints’ because I’ve not seen poetry inserted in a PhD dissertation before. Maybe I have not read enough theses, but since my committee didn’t complain, I can assume that it was acceptable to them.

Or when I read news that the sun’s magnetic pole flipped (wow! interstellar dust will be deflected away instead of focused inward)

….if you have time, could you explain what you know of this?

Scott E. Forbush discovered the surprising inverse relationship between solar activity and cosmic rays

I might be confusing things in thinking about Forbush Decrease?

thanks for the photos of Etna, those are absolutely amazing. The photos seem like they were taken from pretty close up. How dangerous is that ?

I’ll try to look for that comet. We have binoculars and a small optical telescope but none of it is set up with any kind of electronic pointing, and the temperature outside ( -80F usually) makes it prohibitively hard to fuss around with equipement. Plus the comet looks like it may be a bit low on the horizon.Winds create a constant band of blowing snow up to ~15 deg up.

As for the meteorites, I thought the reason we saw few of them was the same reason bugs hit the front windshield of teh car as opposed to the side windows. Because Earth’s motion makes the equator sweep through a larger area in space than the poles. But you’re right Antarctica is a prime spot for collecting meteorites.

On a completely different subject, did you red the book “Deception Point” by Dan Brown, author of the now famous Da Vinci code. I found it in the small library we have down here and despite the clearly unreal statement that all the statements in the book are facts, I really enjoyed it. I has many “scientific” scenes regarding meteorites. You should read it.
Cheers

Denis

The boundaries of the heliosphere is the location of the limits of my experimental range. I step outside of that arena to see bigger pictures, but don’t feel as qualified to say as much. So from my planetary science perspective, I get a ‘wow’ sense when I read news of Voyager beginning its venture into interstellar space (wow! Our robot is among the stars) Or when I read news that the sun’s magnetic pole flipped (wow! interstellar dust will be deflected away instead of focused inward) Or when I visit volcanoes, ignoring their aesthetic qualities (wow! look at the remaining energy of Earth’s formation and subsequent impacts).

Jack Baggaley’s AMOR measurements of interstellar dust showing an enhancement in the beta Pic direction (see page 3 of my Sky and Telescope Dust article) also gives me a tremendous wow! sense. [On the latter, we need another AMOR-like station to confirm his data!]. The poetry I wrote at my MPI-K website (bottom of the page) does a reasonable job to sum up my wild “relations in space” perspective. When I included this text in my dissertation, none of my PhD committee complained.

The announcement by McKay et al. [1] that evidence of biological activity may be present in the Martian meteorite ALH84001, has resulted in a reassessment of how to search for life on Mars and elsewhere. In the case of the Mars meteorite report, all of the key pieces of evidence presented were identified in abundant, zoned domains of calcium–iron–magnesium carbonate

Reaching understandings of the geometries of expression within the cosmos, it is hard not to think of the outer periphery of the planet’s extensions and the “relations in space.”

Looking up and seeing “this auroric painting” and all the physics of education associated, I tend to see a much more dynamical relation to the grand scheme of things? Don’t any of you?

Maybe this is the romance with nature, as one learns, become’s increasing complex yet simply, beautiful?

I can’t imagine being in the “great while south though,” while polarities are being defined in such beautiful ways.

For the first time, scientists have demonstrated that precise measurements of Earth’s changing gravity field can effectively monitor changes in the planet’s climate and weather.

Maybe these swirls are “indicative of things on the earth,” while holding onto the thought of “time variable measures?” I was thinking of “Grace” since it may be all inclusive?

Denis: Your night sky meditations will probably stay in your memory for the rest of your life. I remember all my own special sky locations. The first times for me to encounter the sky as a kid on Oahu probably influenced my later choice of career. These were the times when my sisters and I slept on the deck of our boat, and if we were out at sea, then the Milky Way was spectacular robe of jewels, reflecting on the water and I felt that I was drowning in the stars.

I remember several nice locations after that, but nothing as spectacular as my boat memories until I visited Etna in September 2004. The volcano was experiencing a flank eruption, and by odd circumstances, my two companions and I were the only people at the eruption after about 10pm, so we had Etna to ourselves. The two were away, busy taking photographs, and I was meditating on the lava and the stars. That’s me, the tiny blue-dot in other side of the flow. It’s easy to be poetic in such circumstances. The photos taken by my friends make it look like the sky was light, but in reality, the sky was dark. I saw the Milky Way above me, sparkling, while below me was the city of Catania, also sparkling, and then the wonderful volcano. I sat there meditating on the whole scene for about 4 or 5 hours that night.

I’m very surprised about the lack of meteors. I realize that half of the year you would not have a dark sky to see them, but during the other half? The ecliptic goes through your view. The AMOR station near Cristchurch, New Zealand records 1000 radar meteors a day (now more than 1 million in their database), their sizes are in the tens of microns. In addition, Antarctica is a prize location to pick up meteorites and micrometeorites (cosmic dust) from the ice. For example, ALH94001 (the “Mars rock“) was picked up from Allen Hills, and there is an active micrometeorite collection effort by Maurette, Kurat, Duprat and others at Dome C/Concordia Station (this is a nice presentation by Duprat). The larger meteorites like the Mars Rock have ablation signs, so surely they are visible in the atmosphere when they land. The micrometeorites, though, probably not, they are “fluffy” and gently float through the atmosphere before they land. I wonder if from your viewing geometry you would see only retrograde meteors..I don’t know, I must think about this. I’m also curious how the interstellar gas flow would look from your location, so then you might see mostly interstellar meteors. (The AMOR station typically record 2 as interstellar out of very 1000.)

If I were you and if I had extra time, I would try to observe comet(s) 73P-B,C/Schwassmann-Wachmann now. It is supposed to be visible in binoculars in the southern sky, relatively high in the early “morning”. The link gives a sky chart.

Ciao!
Amara

Denis

It was close to freezing that night.

Overall, the chances of seeing an aurora are not all that bad — especially in Canada and the United States. Because the north magnetic pole lies in North America, the auroral oval generally reaches farther south there. This means observers at a given latitude in North America have a better chance of seeing an aurora than those at the same latitude in Europe or Asia. Both Rome and Chicago lie at a latitude of 42°, for example, but Rome averages one aurora per decade while Chicago could see about ten each year.

I wonder if Brian Greene collaborated on “Frequency” also being an actor in that show.

You played yourself–twice–in the movie, “Frequency”. The movie is about a father communicating from 1969 with his son in the present on a ham radio, due to an unusual atmospheric aurora that bounces radio signals across time, not just space. You played Brian Greene being interviewed by Dick Cavett as both a younger and older man. Any reflections on either the interesting premise of the movie, or the adventures of being on the big screen?

>How funny that you started looking into this, I was just searching today
>the height at which auroras occur and the height at which volcano ashes
>go.

Probably you noticed that the ‘business’ of the dispersion of volcanic ash clouds is large, funded by both governments and companies because of the aviation hazards. That’s why I could easily find several advanced online software tools to try hypothetical Erebus eruptions. But that ‘business’ seems to stop at about 41000 ft, the upper limit of where normal airplanes fly! Above 41,000 feet much less is known.

>I am however curious about one thing. How sharp is the bottom limit of
>the aurora activity.

I don’t know. My understanding of auroras is pretty basic. As I understand the physics, solar wind (charged) particles travel along Earth’s magnetic field and collide into molecules in Earth’s atmosphere which then fluoresce in colors dependent on their molecular properties. The colors are an indication of the height at which the fluorescence occurs, I think because of the dominant molecule in that strata (?). An observers sky book I have (”Out of the Blue” by John Naylor) says that green indicates a height between 100 and 300 km, and red tends to be between 300km and 1000km. I scanned quickly more colors at web sites and saw that pink is considered a relatively low altitude color.

The important details are that the energy of the solar wind particles is high, and when the particles enter the Earth’s magnetotail, the large electric potential between the poles and the magnetotail pushes the electrons at high speed into molecules in the polar ionosphere. The atmospheric/ionospheric gas atoms are energized, they glow, and provide a less energetic current for the particles to flow back (’bounce’) out of the polar region.

I guess the lower edge to the aurora would be a cutoff in the preferred density of our Earth’s atmospheric molecules, at the same time dependent on the energy of the solar wind particles, which are, in turn, dependent on the activity of the Sun. My book (_Out of the Blue_) did say, however, that ’some reports speak of aurorae occurring very close to the ground so that they partially veil high mountains, but that expert opinion tends to dismiss such sightings as visual illusions (!) because of the difficulty in explaining how the aurora can form in the dense air of the troposphere’. It sounds like you are experiencing a hell of a visual illusion!

I have to study to learn what are the exact atmospheric density conditions to trigger aurora, but the magnetic field goes to the ground. I wonder what determines the height at the pole where the electrons/protons ‘bounce’? I have to study this too. Erebus is beautifully situated very close to the southern magnetic pole, so if there are unusual volcanic dust+dust-cloud-particle-accelerations along magnetic field lines, there would be the place to look!

I’ll give you another neat visual ionsophere phenomena; do you remember the Leonids showers? In the display in 2001, Tom Polakis took this beautiful Leonids time exposure, image, which floored our Heidelberg dust group. Notice that the brighter meteors change color from green to orange to magenta. Our group’s home-brewed explanation was that the largest particles are ‘probing’ different composition layers of the Earth’s atmosphere. The ionized trail of green would be due to oxygen, for example, and then the color changes as the particles move deeper. These are the same colors you see in the aurora. When I talked to one of the Leonids meteor experts, he told me that the reason for the colors in the meteor trails is not that simple, but I didn’t get his full explanation, so maybe you can use our dust group’s idea as only a working hypothesis.

I posted online because I thought some others would like to hear some of this, but we can take future discussions offline. Thanks for your email address.

Ciao!
Amara

How funny that you started looking into this, I was just serching today the height at which auroras occur and the height at which volcano ashes go. Got about the same number as you did. I am however curious about one think. How sharp is the bottom limit of the aurora activity. Often when I see auroras down here and when they are really intense ( I’ve seen intense ones twice now and by intense I mean that you see the colors very brightly and the auroras movie very fast timescales of seconds), it really looks like the upper atmosphere lights up first and then the aurora seems to come down and come closer to you as it evolves, sometimes making it scary for an instant as it seems like if it were to continue it would come down all the way to you– somewhat liek firworks exploding. It might just be an optical effect.
As for noctilucent clouds., I haven’t seen any here in Antarctica, but I remember seeing something that looked like it on October 19th 2005, just before I left CA, when Vandenberg had a rocket launch of their last Titan rocket.
Anyways, if you want to write to me directly, don’t hesitate (dbarkats at caltech dot edu).
Ciao

Denis

I was being dumb by thinking that I could write a proposal to look for a correlation between Erebus activity and aurora. I have to find a hint/link _first_, and then ask for funding to look for the reason. Your suggestion to get me to look into this idea and formulate it for a proposal was pretty neat anyway.

To explain. Can there be a connection between volcanic eruptions and auroral activity?. Not sure yet, but maybe. The heights of the gas and dust plumes from energetic volcanic eruptions reach up to about 20 km, however there are rare eruptions where the plumes reach three or four times that height. The bottom of auroral activity (when you see the pinks) is at about 100 km. Between the two is the middle atmosphere (stratosphere + mesosphere) and a large temperature drop. I don’t know if there is a temperature inversion but the vertical transport mechanism through the region is via atmospheric tides.

My first try to learn how high and far volcanic ash clouds from an Erebus eruption might travel was via an online program running the “Volcanic Ash Forecast Transport and Disperson Model”, In a couple of minutes, I had my output which showed me that the dust/gas dispersed over a wide area in only an hour after an eruption, but the program maximum height goes to only about 60 km. Perhaps it was written only to help predict dangers for aircraft. Or perhaps the physics is predominately lateral, but I don’t know if further vertical transport via the atmospheric tides is possible or not. This is the main question remaining before I look at actual data to see if there could be coincidences in time. I shouldn’t limit myself to the Antarctic either; the Arctic region has aurora and active volcanoes (in Iceland) not too far away too.

For a hint that the middle atmosphere below auroras has interesting electrodynamic properties, I did learn of another cool phenomena involving dust and gas at 80 km, occuring seasonally over the polar regions called noctilucent clouds. Have you seen these? Noctilucent clouds are a relatively recent phenomena on Earth, it was first recorded in 1885, perhaps not coincidently soon after Krakatau had a major eruption. The orange background in Munch’s “The Scream” painting is thought now to be linked to the unusual atmospheric phenomena at that time. They have a charged electrodynamical component, as well, because they are seen in radar echoes. The mystery of noctilucent clouds’ existence is that it is too dry for clouds to form that high. Clearly water vapor succeeded to reach that altitude, so one way it is possible is for methane to rise in the atmosphere, be broken apart by solar UV radiation, and then form water molecules. Perhaps the theory has changed, but I read in another source that a seed is necessary and for the seed we have meteoritic ~10 nanometer dust raining down from above (40 tons of dust fall on the Earth every day, after all). And on APOD, they say that at least some of the clouds result from freezing exhaust of the space shuttles! So noctilucent clouds are a fun mystery, that could well be solved when the “Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere” (AIM) mission is launched this September. So fun stuff! Thank your aurora pictures and words that triggered all of this.