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WONDERS OF NATURE
Polar Lights. Nature miracle
On clear frosty nights, the northern taiga in the Khibiny is surrounded by silence. Only occasionally does a dry branch of spruce crackle, on which a lump of snow has fallen from the upper branches ... The darkness is broken only by the dim lights of countless stars. But there comes a moment when the night sky suddenly becomes colorful and so bright that even distant mountains can be seen.
This game of subtly changing outlines and imperceptibly passing into each other colors is a real celestial symphony. Arkhangelsk coast-dwellers have long called the play of light in the sky flashes. In our time, this beautiful and capacious word has given way to the cumbersome and rather clumsy expression "polar lights". Scientists call this phenomenon with beautiful Latin terms "aurora borealis" and "aurora australis". Science needed two terms due to the fact that auroras are observed most often in two regions of the world: the Arctic and Antarctic. They are respectively called in Latin "northern" and "southern" lights. However, it happens that "heavenly light" appears far enough from the poles. So, from the Russian chronicles it is known that on April 5, 1242, at the height of the battle between Russian soldiers and the crusader knights, known as the Battle on the Ice, a radiance appeared in the sky over Lake Peipus in the form of fiery spears and arrows. Deciding that this was God's sign, foreshadowing victory, the knights of Alexander Nevsky rushed into battle with tenfold strength and won. The chronicler tells that eyewitnesses unanimously took the flashes for the "heavenly army" that came to the aid of the Russian troops: “Behold, I heard from a witness, and I spoke, as if I saw the regiment of God on the air, coming to the aid of Alexandrov, and many saw the faithful regiment of God, helping Alexander.” Sometimes the auroras reach exceptional strength and occupy vast expanses of the celestial sphere. For example, the radiance of February 4, 1872 covered almost the entire northern hemisphere, and on the night of January 25-26, 1938, "heavenly lights" were observed throughout European Russia. In February 1950, a bright and prolonged aurora was burning in the sky over Moscow. For several hours, two large arcs shone on the northern side of the sky - bright red and light green. They constantly changed brightness and location, disappeared, reappeared, approached and moved away from each other. Many Muscovites then for the first time enjoyed this exotic spectacle for our latitudes. Even experienced polar explorers cannot indifferently see the magical play of shapes and colors on the heavenly canvas. Describing later what they saw, and strict scientists become poets for a while. For a long time it has become a classic, for example, the description of flashes made by the famous polar explorer, discoverer of Severnaya Zemlya G. A. Ushakov in his book "On the Untraveled Land": "The sky was on fire. An endless transparent veil covered the entire sky. Some invisible force shook it. All of it burned with a gentle purple light. Here and there bright flashes appeared and then turned pale, as if clouds were born and dispersed only for a moment. What a fraction of a second it seemed as if the radiance had gone out. But long beams, in some places gathered in bright beams, fluttered above us with a pale green light. Here they burst from a place and from all sides, swift as lightning, rushed to the zenith. For a moment they froze in the sky, formed a huge continuous crown, fluttered and went out. None of us noticed when and how a huge wide curtain appeared in the south. Large, clear folds adorned it, it was woven from an incalculable mass of tightly closed rays. Waves of red and green light, alternating, swept through it from one end to the other. It was impossible to figure out where they arise, where they run from and where they die. Separate panels of the curtain flashed brightly and immediately turned pale. The curtain seemed to move smoothly. Long rays appeared again in the west. Then again crimson clouds covered half the sky. Light chaos increased again. Once more the rays rushed to the zenith. The picture changed every moment... Directly in the east, between the dark clouds, a narrow gap burned with a bright yellow light. Before I had time to hold my gaze here, as from behind a cloud, a little above this crack, an unknown force threw out a whole sheaf of rays, similar to a half-open fan. The most delicate shades of flowers - red, crimson, yellow and green - painted him. The rays also changed their color every moment. One was crimson for a fraction of a second, then turned purple, suddenly turned into a pale yellow color, which immediately turned into phosphorescent green. This play of light, indescribable in its beauty, continued for about a quarter of an hour. The rays stretched out many times, reached almost to the zenith, then fell and grew again. Finally, they began to turn pale and approached each other. The celestial fan closed and suddenly turned into a huge white ostrich feather, steeply wrapped towards the south. The bright colors that had just fantastically adorned the sky faded. From the former enchanting picture, only pale strokes remained ... " Since prehistoric times, auroras have been of interest to man. But it was only in the XNUMXth century that they were able to understand the mechanism of their occurrence, although two hundred years earlier Lomonosov quite correctly assumed that electric forces were involved in this. It has now been proven that the formation of auroras occurs in the upper atmosphere at an altitude of sixty to a thousand kilometers. The reason for it is the flow of high-energy charged particles ejected by the Sun - the "solar wind". Colliding with the molecules and atoms of gases in the rarefied part of the Earth's air envelope, the flow of these particles causes a glow, just as it happens in fluorescent lamps, where electrons are passed through a rarefied gas. And the confinement of auroras to the Arctic and Antarctic latitudes is associated with the action of the magnetic field of our planet, which deflects the flow of particles to the poles. The duration of auroras is different - from an hour to several days, and their number, duration and brightness increase sharply during periods when the number of spots on the Sun increases, that is, every eleven years. It is interesting that luminous arches and arcs in the sky are formed mainly at altitudes from sixty to one hundred kilometers, and a glow in the form of swaying curtains - at an altitude of 110-120 kilometers. At the highest altitudes (900-1000 kilometers), red lights are formed, below their color is purple, and in the layers closest to the Earth, green rays and flashes are formed. Intense auroras usually cause powerful "magnetic storms" in the air, disrupting the normal operation of radio devices and affecting the behavior of the compass needle. Fortunately, most of the flashes appear in the sky in winter, when at the height of the polar night, planes and ships almost do not make flights, and the ground work of geologists, glaciologists and other polar scientists is reduced to a minimum. Only specialists in the "heavenly office" - meteorologists - have to receive a full dose of trouble in connection with the disorder in their own "economy". And for an ordinary traveler in the North, not burdened with the obligation to regularly go on the air, the appearance of "heavenly lights" is simply an amazingly beautiful spectacle that gives endless aesthetic pleasure. Here is another story about the sensations experienced at the sight of the aurora borealis, from an old geographical book written by a wonderful teacher, geographer and traveler, author of many gymnasium textbooks Sergei Mech. “We rode dogs along the Siberian tundra. The thermometer showed 38 degrees below zero. Night was falling. From severe frost, our beards became like tangled wires, and our eyelashes looked like icy fringe, and our eyelids froze when we blinked. The dogs turned completely white and, surrounded thick cloud of steam, seemed like something like polar bears. We had to run / near the sled so as not to freeze our legs, which were already losing sensation. At eight in the evening we saw a small forest ahead and stopped for the night. On a platform of three square meters we they shoveled all the snow, made a shaft of it on three sides, and lit a fire on the fourth. They lined the bottom of the pit with skins and climbed into sleeping bags. All around was a snowy desert, and the stars shone in the black sky. The silence was overwhelming, deep, dead. Hidden in my bag, I tried to sleep, but I could not. After lying down for half an hour, I stuck my head out to look at the sky again, and involuntarily cried out in amazement. A wide arc of the most brilliant colors shone in the sky like a huge rainbow, and thousands of red and yellow beams shot up from it every now and then. It was the aurora. I woke my comrades so that they too could admire the extraordinary spectacle, and we all gazed at it, fascinated. After a while, the huge arc began to rise higher and higher, another arc formed above it, just as brilliant and also emitting thin, multi-colored rays. Suddenly, like a red fire flooded the entire sky, coloring the snow with a purple gleam. Before I could cry out in astonishment, the purple vanished and an orange gleam flashed in its place, as if all the air were on fire in an instant. I involuntarily held my breath and waited for the roll of thunder that would inevitably follow this flash of light, but on earth not a single sound broke the solemn stillness of the night. Never before had I imagined that the aurora borealis could be so magnificent. Rapid transitions of red, blue, green and yellow colors were reflected so brightly on the surface of the snow that the entire tundra seemed alternately now flooded with blood, then illuminated by a deathly-pale green radiance, through which mighty crimson and yellow arcs miraculously shone. But that was not all. A few minutes later, both arcs immediately broke up together into a thousand vertical stripes, each of which represented all the colors of the rainbow. Across the whole sky, from edge to edge, now stretched two huge semicircles of multi-colored stripes, and these stripes oscillated and fluttered with such speed that the eye could not follow them. It seemed as if the whole world was engulfed in some marvelous fire. Then the beauty began to weaken, the arcs became paler, and the colored stripes flashed less and less and also turned pale. In half an hour there was nothing left in the sky to remind us of the splendid spectacle we had just marveled at. When the last rays went out, we hid in our bags and fell asleep." More than a hundred years have passed since the Sword's journey. But even a hundred and five hundred years before him, and a hundred or two hundred years after, travelers in the polar countries will still wake up friends and leave their houses or tents to look at the sky playing with flashes for hours. And the amazing, mysterious and beautiful phenomenon of nature, which idle journalists habitually call "heavenly extravaganza", and the old polar explorer Georgy Ushakov once called tenderly and poetically - "the smile of the Arctic" will still excite and give pleasure to people... Author: B.Wagner
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