Historical accounts from the largest electromagnetic storm ever recorded It was September 1, 1859, and boy were people confused. The global telegraph system failed, telegraph paper spontaneously lit on fire, and the sky was filled with brilliant colors and patterns. The New York Times described it thusly: “alternating great pillars, rolling cumuli shooting streamers, curdled and wisped and fleecy waves—rapidly changing its hue from red to orange, orange to yellow, and yellow to white, and back in the same order to brilliant red.” In the months shortly after the incident, newspapers and scientific journals found other possible causes. Scientific American postulated falling debris from active volcanoes, the San Francisco Heraldtheorized about “nebulous matter” from “planetary spaces,” and Harper’s Weekly settled on reflections from distant icebergs. Ars Technica has collected historical documents recording the contemporary responses, including the above painting by Frederic Edwin Church, possibly a portrayal of the aurora. Click through to check it out.
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Historical accounts from the largest electromagnetic storm ever recorded

It was September 1, 1859, and boy were people confused. The global telegraph system failed, telegraph paper spontaneously lit on fire, and the sky was filled with brilliant colors and patterns. The New York Times described it thusly: “alternating great pillars, rolling cumuli shooting streamers, curdled and wisped and fleecy waves—rapidly changing its hue from red to orange, orange to yellow, and yellow to white, and back in the same order to brilliant red.”

In the months shortly after the incident, newspapers and scientific journals found other possible causes. Scientific American postulated falling debris from active volcanoes, the San Francisco Heraldtheorized about “nebulous matter” from “planetary spaces,” and Harper’s Weekly settled on reflections from distant icebergs.

Ars Technica has collected historical documents recording the contemporary responses, including the above painting by Frederic Edwin Church, possibly a portrayal of the aurora. Click through to check it out.

(via sciencecenter)

scipsy:

Cloud vortices are produced “when air moving over the smooth ocean surface is forced over some obstacle, like an island. The disturbance creates eddies in the air, which have blown the clouds into the pattern seen here. At the center of each eddy is a dark, cloud-free circle, which gets progressively smaller as the turbulence in the air subsides.”

These phenomena are also known as Von Karman vortices. “Von Karman vortices form nearly everywhere that fluid flow is disturbed by an object.”

The images show a cloud vortex swirling behind Jan Mayen Island in the Greenland Sea, another one near Heard Island, in the Indian Ocean and two formed by the winds rushing over the Cape Verde Islands.

The animation shows how a von Karman vortex develops behind a cylinder moving through a fluid.

The Fujiwhara effect, named after Japanese meteorologist Sakuhei Fujiwhara, is a type of interaction between two cyclonic vortices, causing them to “orbit” each other. One example was in Oct. 2009, when Typhoon Melor forced Typhoon Parma (right and left, respectively) to reverse course and head southeast, where it battered the Philippine island of Luzon for a second time. (via: Wikipedia) (photo: NASA MODIS Rapid Response Team, GSFC)
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The Fujiwhara effect, named after Japanese meteorologist Sakuhei Fujiwhara, is a type of interaction between two cyclonic vortices, causing them to “orbit” each other. One example was in Oct. 2009, when Typhoon Melor forced Typhoon Parma (right and left, respectively) to reverse course and head southeast, where it battered the Philippine island of Luzon for a second time. (via: Wikipedia)

(photo: NASA MODIS Rapid Response Team, GSFC)