Earth as Electrical Transformer
Earth as Electrical Transformer
Talk for Observing the Frontier 2017, © 2017 Michael Clarage
Introduction
I am very excited to be here, and honored to be counted in the same group as Pierre-Marie Robitaille, Dave Talbot, and Ben Davidson.
Proposed large scale electrical structure between stars and planets
I have proposed this diagram for the large-scale electric potential structure between the Sun and Earth.
The same overall structure should be true between all stars and their orbiting planets. The star is the highest electrical potential, the anode. Each planet is a cathode, a local minimum, which has a very steep rise in electrical potential as you move away from the surface, then a hump at the planet’s Van Allen belts, then a slow rise of a much smaller amount up to the star. I proposed this shape by combining laboratory measurements of plasma discharge with electrical measurements coming from multiple satellites orbiting the Earth. This sketch is static and only one-dimensional. The reality is of course much more complicated, as each planet is spinning on its own axis, and orbiting in an ellipse through the vast electrical three-dimensional electric field of the star, and there are spiraling waves of electric and magnetic fields coming from the star as well as streams of charged particles. If we were to examine in detail any one piece of my simple sketch we would find many complex, beautiful, dynamic phenomena.
The steep rise of electrical potential while leaving the planet has been verified on Earth. The potential does rise several hundred thousand volts going from the ground up to the ionosphere. How might the planet stay at such a low electrical potential? Wouldn’t any imbalance tend to leak away over time? I have found one possible mechanism. The Birkeland currents flowing into and out of the Earth appear to have just such an imbalance, constantly feeding fresh negative charge into the Earth.
While presenting this possible mechanism today, I will also make a fresh appeal to anyone studying our Solar System, that we need to make much more bold theories about the functions of various electromagnetic structures we are finding. What is the function of the Van Allen belts? Not simply what are its properties. What is the function of the ionosphere? What is the function of lightning? We too often are still looking at the things around us as inevitable and random structures. But they are not inevitable and they are not random.
In our own bodies, the multilayered walls of arteries and veins are not random, inevitable structures. They are structures that serve very particular functions within a complex whole. Sometimes I imagine what it would be like to be a tiny, tiny astronomer stuck on one of the molecules inside one of the cells inside one of the layers in a blood vessel. If I were that small relative to the structures around me, and I turned my tiny telescopes out at all that was around me, would I be able to see that I was inside such a structure? If perhaps I had a very short life span, living only a few microseconds, would I be able to study such things as the flow of blood or the actions of nerves? From such a limited vantage point, I could imagine getting into arguments with my fellow micro-beings if the world around us was simply random, disconnected, and inevitable – or whether we were organized beings that lived inside larger structures that are also organized, and that everything at every level is serving some function.
I definitely fall into the second camp, and I am asking that we all ponder deeply, what might be the functions of such things as magnetospheres and ionospheres and aurora borealis.
The larger magnetic earth
Now we know that electromagnetic fields and currents can travel through space, and that our solar system is filled with them. We are finding more every year. Every satellite that goes up, we find more types of fields and currents and flux tubes and travelling double layers and exploding double layers and magnetic tornados and Birkeland currents connecting moons to planets and ribbons of charges flowing around our heliosphere indicating that vast rivers of fields and currents connect our Sun to surrounding stars. And all of this together is more complicated than any one person or even group of people has yet conceived.
Or, to switch metaphors, we have up until now been largely studying the skeletal system of stars and planets, and we are just starting to piece together images of the muscles, blood, and organs of solar systems. We are just starting to build a picture of the flesh and blood of the Solar System.
Here is a cartoon showing some of the large-scale structures we are fairly certain of
Figure 1 Magnetosphere currents, from COMET project
These yellow arrows show the large scale flow of electric currents. The solid Earth is the shiny ball here. We need start seeing the solid Earth more as the bones, and all this larger electromagnetic substance as the muscles and organs. The Earth, the real Earth, is much larger and much more complicated than the rock in the center, just as you and I are large and much more complicated than our skeletal systems. It is as if we have been using only one kind of brush to paint the stars and planets. We have been using only the brush of rocky matter connected by gravity, this way we only see the skeletons of planets and stars. In our bodies the skeleton supports, gives the rocky structure, for the more subtle and fluid muscles and organs, and all activated by electrical nervous systems. The solid Earth supports, gives the rocky structure, to the more subtle and softer magnetic structures, all activated by even finer electrical impulses.
Coming back to the currents around the Earth, you can see sprouting out of the pole several arched yellow bands. Those are called the Region 1 and Region 2 currents.
Figure 2 Region 1 and 2 field aligned currents[1]
Current into and out of the earth
The outer current sheet, Region 2, connects to a ring of current circling the Earth. The inner sheet, Region 1, connects to regions farther out in the magnetosphere. Let’s zoom out a bit. You can see that some currents connect the Earth back out to the magnetosphere, and some currents stay local, closer to the Earth. I don’t expect you to make sense out of this drawing by looking at it just once. I want you to get a feeling for some of the complexity of the electric and magnetic structures that make up what I am calling the larger body of the Earth.
Zooming in again, we are going to look in more detail at these current sheets going into and out of the Earth at the poles.
The currents going into and out of the Earth are also called Field Aligned Currents, since they follow the magnetic field lines of the Earth. Let’s look at some of this in action, from space.
[there are 2 movie version] This is from NASA’s Imager for Magnetopause-to-Auora Global Exploration satellite, taken in the far UV spectrum. The aurora are where the field aligned currents meet the ionosphere. As you can see the real life event is much more complicated than the simple schematic.
Most American and European papers I have read about this flow of charges are content to draw tidy diagrams and do not call attention to what we do not know. Some Russian papers on the subject are more honest about what is not yet clear. For example, the section in the drawing where the incoming and outgoing currents travel along parallel to the Earth. In the simple diagram those look like simple continuation of the incoming and outgoing field aligned currents. But there is very little direct measurement of that part between the incoming and outgoing currents. And what little direct measurement we have seems to indicate those sections of current flow are only carrying about 1/10th what is going into and out of the poles. In other words, current goes in, current goes out, but we don’t really know what happens in between. Do those currents go into the body of the Earth, do they go into complex circulations in the ionosphere?
Here is a different view of the electric current flowing into and out of the poles. This is from the AMPERE project out of John Hopkins University. This is a fleet of communications satellites whose on-board magnetometers are also being used by the people at John Hopkins to measure magnetic field variations around the Earth. Each of those trajectories is the path of one of the satellites. The colored lines drawn on the trajectory represent the strength of the magnetic field at that place.
Figure 3 Iridium satellites (image credit: JHU/APL)
Using Ampere’s law – that magnetic fields are created by an electric current - we can work backwards from all the magnetic field measurements to deduce what must be the electric currents going into and out of the poles.
Figure 4 Image credit JHU/APL[2]
In this image, the left side is like the image we were just looking at – the paths of the satellites, and the strengths of the magnetic fields at each point. The right side is the calculation of the electric currents that must be present in order to produce the magnetic fields the satellites found. You can see the general shape of our field aligned currents, the blue denotes downward current into the Earth, the red denotes upward current away from the Earth. Here is a movie version, so you can get a feeling for some of the complexity.
The currents coming into and flowing out of the Earth are a beautiful, complex, 3-dimensional transformation of electrical energy. We are looking at millions of amperes of current flowing at any point in time.
A current is moving charges. We define positive current flow to be the motion of positive charges. But we know in the world there are both positive and negative charges, so when we say “current is flowing up” we can mean that positive charges are flowing up and also that negative charges are flowing down. If negative charges are flowing down, we call that, and with many instruments actually measure that, as current flowing up. Above the Earth we see both. In these red regions there are positive ions flowing up and electrons flowing down. Which means, you guessed it, that once again, the real picture of what is going on is much more complicated that what we see here.
Ignoring for now whether it is electrons or positive ions, we can simply look at “the current” flowing into and out of the north pole,
Figure 5 Current into (blue) and out of (red) the North Pole. Time is first week of April 2010.
The red is the total upward current out of the North Pole, the blue is the total downward current. The horizontal axis is one week. You can see that the magnitudes of the incoming and outflowing currents are very strongly correlated. That is, if a lot is current is flowing into the north pole, then a lot of current is also flowing back out. The vertical scale is in millions of amperes. This is generally the scale: a continuous flow of 5 to 10 million amps flowing into and out of the poles.
On the theme of looking at the Earth as an electrical transformer, we can look at the accumulation and discharge of electricity – like a battery or capacitor the Earth might store and release charge. We can also look at the Earth as an AC transformer where energy is transferred purely through the alternation of current flow.
I first wanted to study the net current flow of the entire Earth. That is, add up the amount of current flowing into both poles, and subtract the amount of current flowing out of both poles. If at some point in time that value is zero, it means that equal amounts of electric current are flowing into and out of the Earth. You do not need to charge in order to transfer energy. Think about AC transformers that transfer energy by alternating charge, not by accumulating it. Here is the plot of the same week, looking at the net current into the Earth, shown in green.
Figure 6 Adding the net current, in green
You can see that the total is not zero, but fluctuates, sometimes even as much as a million amperes.
Correlations in Time
We know that variations in the solar wind directly affect how much current flows into and out of the Earth. Birkeland was basically run out of town for proposing such a thing, and as late as 1960 you could still lose your job as an astronomy teacher for proposing it. Now we can say that without fear. I wanted to look for cycles here. There are no simple cycles obvious to the eye. But we can perform what is called a cross correlation of the data. You shift the data in time relative to itself, and see how similar the data is to itself after a certain amount of time. For example, if I took readings of the intensity of daylight here outside the hotel, and I took readings every few minutes for several days. Now take that plot and shift it relative to itself, and see how similar it is to itself. The light each day will tend to be maximum in the middle of each day, so I would see the maximum self-similarity every time I shifted the plots by 24 hours relative to each other. Here is such a shifting correlation function, of the net current into the Earth between April and November of 2010.
Figure 7 cross correlation of the net current over eight months April to November 2010
When the value of the Correlation is higher, there is more similarity of the signal when it is shifted that much. Looking at the Correlation function of our net current data, we can clearly see there are peaks which are spaced about 27 days apart. That means, if you look at the net current flowing into the Earth now, then then whatever that current is doing, increasing, decreasing, staying the same, it was doing something similar 27 days ago, and it will tend to do the same thing 27 days in the future. Twenty-Seven days is very close to the rotational period of the Sun and also close to the orbital period of our Moon. The Moon comes back to the same place relative to the stars every 27.3 days, and back to the same place relative to the Sun & Earth every 29.5 days. From the Earth’s point of view, the period of the rotation of the Sun’s magnetic field is 27 days.
Figure 8 previous figure with markings for the long term self-similarity
This means that if you look at the net current flowing through the Earth, that net current tends to be similar to itself on a period close to the rotational period of the Sun’s magnetic field. Whatever the pattern of net current flow through the Earth, the general shape of that current tends to repeat itself with that frequency.
If we zoom into the cross correlation function, we see this
Figure 9 zoom into net current correlation, showing 24 hours variation
These smaller oscillations of similarity take place at 24 hour intervals. It does not mean that any more or less current is flowing at some time of day, but means that whatever the trends of the net current flow, it is similar to the trend of the current flow 24 hours previously. This one surprised me because when you look at movies of the aurora, they seem to be happening completely separate from the solid Earth. And as far as I know, no one has published any results linking the current flow of the aurora to features of the solid Earth. This would be a good area for someone to look into, since this method could shed light on the conductivities of various parts of the solid Earth. The size of the daily correlation is substantial. Whatever factors the solid Earth contributes, those factors are of equal magnitude to the variations imposed by the 27 day cycle of passing through the Heliospheric current sheet.
Net charging of the Earth?
Since we have data of the current flowing up out of the North pole, and down into the North pole, and up out of the South pole and down into the South pole, we can add those all together and have an estimate for the net current flow into the Earth as a whole. If the Earth were a neutral body then we would expect that the net current flow averages to zero. The satellite data comes in a cadence of 2 minutes. If the net current to the Earth were 1 million amps during 2 minute interval, that is 120 seconds, so the Earth would accumulate 120 million Coulombs of charge during that 2 minutes. When we do a running summation of the net current to the Earth from April to November in 2010, we get this
Figure 10 cumulative charge on earth
This one surprised me. As the days go by there is on average consistently a net positive current flow out of the Earth. Of course my graph here does not take into account any other ways that accumulated charge might dissipate. I am just looking at the current at the poles. And yes, there certainly could be some systematic offset in the satellite data. I am looking into both of those issues. But if we take the data for what it is, that means the Earth has an ongoing removal of positive charge – the net current is up, away from the Earth, and the direction of current is defined as the direction of flow of positive charges. In other words, the Earth is being driven to be negatively charged. The Earth is being driven to lower electrical potential relative to its environment. Which is in agreement with my proposed large scale electrical relation between stars and planets.
Earthquakes
I don’t think it is possible to attend one of Ben’s conferences with at least trying to speak about earthquakes.
We can look at earthquakes during the same time, April through November 2010 and compare earthquake activity to the net current flowing into and out of the Earth. The blue line is a measure of the earthquake activity that day. The green line is a cumulative sum of the net global current.
To get a measure of the earthquake activity on a given day, I simply added up all the magnitude values of all the earthquakes listed for that day. So if there were only two magnitude 6 quakes on June 16th, the earthquake curve would have a value of 12 for that day. The green line is the cumulative sum of the net current to the Earth. (The vertical axis is fairly arbitrary units.) I wanted to look at this because, I was thinking, if the Earth is accumulating charge it will be under more stress, and being under more stress might have some correlation to earthquake activity. I realize this is a very limited sample. But what it looks like to me is that there is more earthquake activity when the net current curve is flat. At first I thought this negated any correlation of the sort I was looking for. I admit I was looking for the earthquakes to strike when that net current curve was steeply rising or falling. But then I thought, what if the earthquake is Nature’s way of getting the current flowing again. If the Earth needs to maintain a proper negative electrical potential relative to its surroundings, the quakes might happen when there is something blocking that accumulation of charge. A flat green line here means there is no net flow of positives away from the Earth out the poles, which means that the Earth is heading towards neutral, towards not the proper tension between it and the Sun. The way the Earth overcomes that, and gets things flowing again, is with earthquakes. You see that after periods of no charge accumulation, there is a burst of earthquake activity, which then allows the proper, healthy charging process to continue.
Biological Example
Unless we know the larger picture, we cannot know how the pieces fit in. Or, knowledge only of the parts is partial knowledge. When we are studying the currents entering or leaving the Earth, we are surely studying a small part of a very large whole. That whole is our solar system. We scientists are struggling to fathom what is the whole? Only then can we make sense out of the parts we are seeing.
Figure 11 SEM image of retina from Micronaut https://www.pinterest.com/pin/92323861086214343/
Here is a Scanning Electron Microscope cross section of our retina. These various blobs and connecting cables are different types of nerves that are in the back of all our eyes, firing away like crazy, allowing us to see what is going on in this room. Here is a schematic, to simplify things.
Figure 12 http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/370/1672/20140195
Light travels up from the bottom of this, and lands on the cones and rods, which are on the top of the diagram. It is very strange that the apparently crystal clear visual image we all see is constructed from light that has to pass through this incredible tangle of nerves. Imagine now that we are instead looking at a cross section of the layers that exist around the Earth. That is, imagine that the layer down here is the outer layer of our magnetosphere, and the next layer is the Van Allen Belts, and there must be connections between those two layers. Imagine the next layer is the Ionosphere, and there must be connections between the Van Allen Belts and the ionosphere. And so on, until you reach us standing here on the surface of the Earth. What if I told you that there are just as many layers and connections between the surface of the Earth and the solar wind as there are layers and connections between the inside of your eye and the back of your retina? I might study the Earth’s ionosphere all my life and yet only be studying one layer. And I won’t really understand what I am looking at unless I know something about all the other layers, and unless I know something about the function of the whole. In the case of the retina, we only really understand each of the layers if we also know that the function of the eye is for the animal to see. I could show you the seven layers of skin cells, or the eight layers of cells that make up a blood vessel, or the eight layers of cells inside our nose that allow us to smell. In each of these examples, we can understand one layer only when we know the function of the whole.
Figure 13 https://cosmotruth.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/skin-anatomy-101/
Figure 14 http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~uzwiak/AnatPhys/Blood_Vessels.html
Figure 15 http://antranik.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/smell-olfaction-epithelium-cilia-olfactory-sensory-neurons-and-basal-cells.jpg
Astronomy is stuck now because we do not sufficiently understand the functions of what we are looking at. We see the ionosphere, we study some of its properties, but we don’t know its place as a part of a larger functioning whole. Most astronomers will tell you that the Earth’s magnetosphere protects the Earth from the dangerous solar wind. To me that is like saying in the nose, the mucus layer protects the delicate nerves from the raw air. Yes, that is true. But the mucus layer is also a dynamic interface whose properties are controlled to allow for the sense of smell to happen in the warm dry air inside your house as well as the cool damp air when you step outside. The ionosphere, the magnetosphere, the Van Allen Belts, they are all being dynamically adjusted to allow for the larger process of transformation or digestion or perception of solar material down to the Earth itself. Astronomy will be stuck as long as we only look at these various layers around the Earth as responding blindly to the impact of the solar wind. We will also be stuck as long as we see phenomena like lightning as happening only because of conditions down here on the surface of the Earth. To take the next step forward we need to acknowledge that there is a larger functioning whole, which has its own needs, its own job to do.
[1] "Space Technology 5 observations of the imbalance of regions 1 and 2 field-aligned currents and its implication to the cross-polar cap Pedersen currents" G. Le, J. A. Slavin, R. J. Strangeway, JGR 3 July 2010 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2009JA014979/full