Untold Earth

Okay, lets see.

Quite often theres this clapping sound popping sound almost like shooting.

This crackling kind of sound.

Like something is burning, like...

It was like oh my gosh, and there it was.

One old man told me that Im very sure that they make sounds.

Even if these were my last words so the aurora make sounds.

People in the arctic have reported hearing sounds from the northern lights for centuries.

These accounts have long been dismissed by modern science as impossible, just a myth or a product of auditory hallucinations but could it be that the ancient stories were right all along?

Here at this location where we are now at Sodankyl we have 150 nights per year the northern lights.

To me aurora borealis in even its faintest form is kind of my friend.

Northern lights is natures most beautiful color show something which you should see once in your lifetime.

Suddenly the sky starts to flash like heavenly disco lights.

If you go to 150 years ago when the first scientists came here they had no idea what the lights actually are.

We started to understand when we got the first satellites but even then not yet fully.

The source of the northern lights comes from the sun.

Its basically two main sources for strong auroras.

Its solar storms, and then you have what they call coronal holes which is dark huge areas in the suns corona which just sends out solar wind particles at much higher speed than the rest of the sun.

So its electricity from space which rains into the atmosphere and makes atmosphere glow.

Well the Earth has a magnetic field which is created by the rotating core in the center.

If we didnt have that magnetosphere the solar wind would actually slowly blow away our atmosphere so there wouldnt be any life here on Earth actually so luckily we have that one.

We have several invisible shields which protect us.

When a solar storm comes and connects with the Earths magnetic field then it will interact and it will shake up the magnetosphere creating what we call a geomagnetic storm.

So if you dont have a little engine on your satellite you will lost that satellite much quicker because of the solar activity and even the solar storms brings with it a lot of energy that is dumped into the atmosphere and that is basically whats also creating the aurora and you can easily understand that a thousand years ago people were stunned or afraid when the whole sky was just kind of in flames.

The indigenous people here, the Smi people they had some beliefs.

First of all you should always respect the lights.

Never tease them, never shout, never wave your hand.

People took actually children inside sometimes because the northern light was known to steal children.

Grandparents and parents are saying you should not tease the northern light, guovssahas.

In the evenings of course when it was dark we used to tease it.

Actually we did and we knew that we shouldnt.

We have one story in Smi.

Often its two brothers.

The youngest brother started to yoik the northern light and he yoiked the teasing words: Guovssahas, guovssahas buoidebihtr njlmmis hrddn gal, cii cii and then suddenly it was like a blizzard and he was burned there and he disappeared.

Only his fur was there on the snow.

I have heard it like two or three times in my life.

I felt that it was something warning me.

I could feel it in my body, like a magnetism or something.

Of course the sound of aurora has been puzzling mankind for ages.

Lots of people think they can hear some crackling sound when theres a very strong northern light outbreaks.

Its a space phenomenon from 80 kilometers up to several hundred kilometers and theres no air there so it should be impossible for sound to propogate from that altitude down to ground.

So if there is some sound, it must probably come from something closer and theres many theories about what that can be.

I do know that they make for example infrasounds.

We are recording here in this observatory also but when we play these sounds to people who have heard [the northern lights] no no no this is not. After working now with professor Unto Laine for some time he suddenly, in the last years he came up with an excellent theory about the possible physical mechanisms of this sound.

I came to this result: we have to construct a microphone array at least with three microphones.

The three microphone system can give you the direction of the sound source so that then you can separate those sound sources in the environment which are close to the ground if its pointing there, leave it out but if the sound is coming here somewhere then pick it.

Unto Laines inversion layer theory posits that on cold clear nights an electrical charge builds up in the air in an inversion layer about 70 meters from the ground.

The same geomagnetic energy that causes auroras in space acts as a trigger releasing the electrical charge in the inversion layer, causing pops and crackling sounds.

The sound source is below 100 meters.

Auroral light is rapidly changing the sound is almost immediately in your ears and this is really why people speak about auroral sounds.

They associate the sounds so strongly with the light movements but what causes the light movements is changes in magnetic field.

I think Unto Laines theory is very important.

It tells about the various energy transfer mechanisms.

The northern light of course is a beautiful thing to see but every time theres storm of northern light theres also something called space weather.

If we want to understand our environment we should know all these energy transfer mechanisms in detail in order to build a perfect model.

The same solar storm or the same effect on the sun will also interfere with our technology-based society today.

We are so much dependant on our technology in space our satellites.

We only have been hit once by a superstorm and that was in 1859 which we call the Carrington Event.

It was so strong that the northern light was seen all the way down to equator.

It took down the entire telegraph system.

Some fires broke out in some of the telegraph systems.

Satellites simply die with too much electron radiation from space weather events.

The question is what will happen if the Earth was hit by the same storm today.

If we would just imagine like this that lets take out all the space action we would just drop to the stone age.

We all on planet Earth we are astronauts on this spaceship.

We want this spaceship to be preserved for future generations