Northern Lights explosive display only the beginning

Southern Alberta Newspapers Photo by Scott Schmidt. EXPLOSIVE DISPLAY: A lengthy display of the Northern Lights earlier this fall offered viewers an explosion of colour rarely seen in this part of the country.

By Anna Smith
Southern Alberta Newspapers
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

The sky has seen a brilliant display of greens, pinks and reds above Southern Alberta in recent months, and according to solar cycles, this was only the start of what might be seen over the next year.

The northern part of the world has seen several instances recently of Aurora Borealis, also known as the Northern Lights, said astronomer Rod DeVries, owner of Eagle Butte Observatory. He explained that the otherworldly lights are caused by increased solar activity, which ebbs and flows over the course of eleven years.

“We’ve got even better coming as the solar activity is going to continue to increase all the way until July of 2025, which is when it’s going to start diminishing again,” said DeVries. “This was sort of the tip of the iceberg.”

Solar activity, in this case, refers to sun spots, which is a term for magnetic storms that form on the surface of the sun. DeVries explained that what looks like a darker spot when facing them head on can be seen as looping jets of plasma.

“Every once in a while, those magnetic lines snap and will actually throw into space a lot of solar charged particles. If those charged particles are thrown into space in the direction of the Earth, well, then we’re going to slam into those,” said DeVries.

The interaction of those particles with Earth’s own magnetic shield and atmosphere, said DeVries, is what causes the vibrant display we know as the Northern and Southern Lights, as every instance of these colours near the North Pole has a mirrored event on the opposite side of the planet.

“What we saw… was, of course, especially vivid,” said DeVries. “Your typical Northern Lights are mostly green. When you see a green bunch of lights, that’s happening about 80 miles up in the atmosphere, which is the lower part of the atmosphere in terms of these events.”

As the particles come in from stronger coronal mass ejections, they interact higher in the atmosphere, said DeVries. At higher altitudes, the lights may appear to be blue, violet and pink, before the upper end of the atmosphere at roughly 1,000 kilometres where we may see reds like what has been observed.

The event that created these lights was a powerful one, said DeVries, which would have sent these particles through space and towards Earth at roughly 3,000 kilometres per second. Usually, Northern Lights events can be predicted several days in advance, but when they reach these speeds, the window is more akin to roughly 12-15 hours.

As we reach the peak of solar activity over the next several months, the region is likely to see more lights up until July 2025, when the events will begin to taper off again. DeVries encourages those interested in seeing them to keep tuned in for updates on likely dates, seek out spaces away from urban light pollution, and to bring a camera, as they’re more sensitive than the human eye.

“Plan to stay up late when you hear there’s a solar storm or a geomagnetic storm coming,” said DeVries. “It’s later in the evening when they get even more vibrant.”