This article is an adaptation of our weekly Science newsletter that was originally sent out on March 24, 2021. Want this in your inbox? Sign up here.
Everyone loves the northern lights. Scientists now say that a subset of those lights. marked by occasional mysterious fuzzy patches of auroral light over the North Pole, is something different.
A space hurricane, a new study calls it.
Writing for Nat Geo, Robin George Andrews described an unusual aurora that appeared in 2014 (illustrated above), rotating in an unorthodox spiral shape with a calm center, or ”eye.” It had “strong winds of plasma—electrically excited gas—zipping around it in a vortex-like manner. Lasting for around eight hours, it was more than 620 miles across and stretched from its base 60 miles above sea level to 500 miles high, reaching into space,” Andrews writes. A space hurricane can occur in our upper atmosphere during quiet periods for the sun, unlike normal northern lights, which are fueled by solar blasts of energetic particles our way.
Unlike a hurricane closer to Earth’s surface, the effects are likely to be very minor. But a space physics researcher says the discovery is profound—and profoundly humbling.
“As humans, we think we know a lot about the universe and our own planet and what is around us,” study co-author Kjellmar Oksavik tells Nat Geo. “And then we discover something we didn’t expect.”
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INSTAGRAM PHOTO OF THE DAY
Confluence: “I’ve always marveled at the points where rivers merge—two different realms churning together in roiling currents before the united channel becomes stronger downstream,” says photographer and Nat Geo Explorer Pete McBride. He has followed the 1,450-mile length of the Colorado River (above), as it meanders from headwaters in the Rocky Mountains to its dry delta in Mexico, providing water for 40 million people on the way.
American Nile: Can the Colorado River be saved?
TODAY IN A MINUTE
Big spender: What’s one big way of making progress on climate change? Getting the world’s biggest customer—the U.S. government—to change its spending habits. On January 27, an executive order encouraged federal agencies to become more environmentally conscious consumers. Nat Geo’s Sarah Gibbens writes that making the government’s $500 billion “purchasing power” greener can act as a catalyst for sustainable businesses, giving climate-conscious producers consistent demand.
Modesty wins: One of the world’s most prestigious architectural awards has gone to a humble French couple whose motto is “Never demolish, never remove or replace, always add, transform, and reuse!” Pritzker Prize winners Anne Lacatonand Jean-Philippe Vassal built a home in France around an existing forest—and kept the trees that were growing inside the house, the Christian Science Monitorreports. The award jury said the couple sees no opposition between “architectural quality, environmental responsibility, and the quest for an ethical society.”
Averting disaster: The Apollo 13 astronauts were most of the way to the moon when the explosion struck. They, famously, had a problem. In Houston, NASA’s Glynn S. Lunney helped bring them home. Briefly, though, the flight director had his doubts. “I had the sense of the bottom falling out from under me and my stomach heading for that dark hole,” he told an oral history project. “It took about 10-20 seconds for me to return from that place.” Lunney died on Friday, the Washington Post reported. He was 84.
Super-essential workers: More than 150,000 Filipino nurses have migrated to the United States since the 1960s, making them the largest group of immigrant nurses in the country. Nearly 32 percent of the 213 registered nurses who have died of COVID-19 and related complications are of Filipino descent, according to a National Nurses United union report. Rosem Morton, a nurse, documentary photographer, and a Nat Geo Explorer, examines the Filipino nursing community.(This work was supported by the National Geographic Society's COVID-19 Emergency Fund for Journalists.)
THE NIGHT SKIES
Super Sugar Moon sparkles: Soon after sunset on Sunday, look toward the eastern horizon to watch the first supermoon of the year to rise. This full moon is considered a supermoon because it will appear about 7 percent bigger and 14 percent brighter than usual. This happens because the moon’s orbit around Earth is egg-shaped and there are times during the lunar cycle when the moon is at its shortest distance from Earth. March full moons take on many names, such as the Sap or Sugar Moon, marking when maple trees are tapped for their sap to make delicious syrup. — Andrew Fazekas
THE BIG TAKEAWAY
Saving the mushroom: Overharvesting, pollution, and fertilizer are wiping out mushrooms. Fungi have historically been left out of conservation initiatives, Anne Pringle, a mycologist and a National Geographic Explorer, tells Nat Geo, but they’re critical to the health of the planet. The white ferula, for example, is listed as critically endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, yet more mushrooms may be in trouble. (Above, the mushrooms we pluck from the ground are just the tips of large fungal networks that live underground and in trees.)
iNaturalist, a joint initiative of the National Geographic Society and the California Academy of Sciences, allows amateur mushroom enthusiasts to log the mushrooms they find and thus generate more field data for scientists. Learn more.
IN A FEW WORDS
If we can listen to the origins of our deepest pain, anger, and grief, we can understand the values that are worth fighting for.
Mei-Ling Hopgood, Northwestern professor; author of Lucky Girl, From: Navigating the complexities of the Asian American experience amid rising racism at home
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THE LAST GLIMPSE
A shark with wings? A 95-million-year-old set of bones discovered by a quarry worker in Mexico has some paleontologists wondering if ancient sharks had peculiar shapes. The six-foot-long fossil represents a kind of filter-feeding shark unlike any previously known. ”My first thoughts on seeing the fossil were that this unique morphology is totally new and unknown among sharks,” Romain Vullo, a paleontologist at the State Museum of Karlsruhe in Germany, tells Nat Geo. (Above, the newly described marine species resembles a shark with wide fins).
This newsletter has been curated and edited by David Beard and Monica Williams, with photo selections by Jen Tse. Have an idea or a link? We'd love to hear from you at david.beard@natgeo.com. Thanks for reading, and have a good week ahead.
