Thunder shakes the clouds, as its loud rumble echoes around the empty beach. Below them, the streets are lifeless as no one dares leave their secure houses for the extreme weather outside.
#Sky view stormy ocean waves full
The once clear sky is now full of thick cloud, staining the sky a deadly shade of indigo, forever darkening like a lid closing on a box trapping darkness inside it. A bird-usually so in control of its own destiny-fights the beast as it toys with it playfully. Trees surrender at the battering wind, forcing leaves and branches to be torn off their trunks. The pier fights against the drowning waves as they attempt to bring it under the surface. Yachts begin to rock with the waves they are like a gymnast balancing on a beam about to fall any second. They crash against the sea wall, shooting upwards and spraying the abandoned cafes and shops. Waves rage upon the sand, sending sand back and forth as they go.
People shelter in cars waiting for the storm to pass…their windscreen wipers furiously fighting against the increasingly powerful rain. The wind teases the scattered rubbish… picking it up then quickly releasing it again. Any last remaining footsteps disappear and are quickly buried beneath the sand. Sandcastles with small motes, which surrounded them, are now filled with seawater. Birds silence their song and flee to safer places. Feeble light from the few surviving streetlights and lanterns appear to dim as the dark clouds move across the sky like a creeping panther. Music from cafes and fare rides come to a halt as their customers quickly disappear and the happy sounds of laughter echo around the empty beach. People escape the beach, quickly grabbing their possessions as rain spits down on them. The excited electrons eventually calm down and release light, which is what we see as the aurora.The Beach. When the electrons reach Earth's thin upper atmosphere, they collide with nitrogen and oxygen molecules, sending them into an excited state. If they were moving with the right speed relative to the wave, they would get picked up and accelerated."
"In order to surf, you need to paddle up to the right speed for an ocean wave to pick you up and accelerate you, and we found that electrons were surfing. "Think about surfing," Jim Schroeder, an assistant professor of physics at Wheaton College who has led research on the process.
Sometimes electrons hitch a ride on these superfast Alfvén waves, reaching speeds as high as 45 million mph as they hurtle downward. As those waves get closer to Earth, they move faster thanks to the planet's magnetic pull. The sun's activity is volatile, and in some cases, the disturbances are so strong they can pull the Earth's magnetic field away from our planet.īut, like a taut rubber band when it's released, the magnetic field snaps back, and the force of that recoil creates powerful ripples known as Alfvén waves about 80,000 miles from the ground. "CMEs typically take several days to arrive at Earth, but have been observed, for some of the most intense storms, to arrive in as short as 18 hours," NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center says. A CME projects plasma and pieces of the sun's magnetic field into the atmosphere. "You really got to get higher levels of storming really to be visible in the U.S., but the G2 prediction has since been degraded down to G1 or less," Bill Murtagh, the program coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration 's Space Weather Prediction Center, said Wednesday.ĭuring the storm, a coronal hole (the spots that appear black on the sun) prompts high winds, which in turn, trigger coronal mass ejections, or CMEs.
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