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Alaskan seismometers record the northern lights:
The aurora borealis, or northern lights, occurs when solar winds--plasma ejected from the Sun's surface--meet the protective magnetic field that surrounds the Earth. The collision of particles produces colorful lights in the sky and creates fluctuations in the magnetic field that are sometimes called solar or space "storms." Magnetometers deployed on the Earth's surface are the primary instrument used to detect these fluctuations, which can significantly impact electrical grids, GPS systems and other crucial infrastructure. The aurora is commonly visible in wintertime in high-latitude regions such as Alaska.
The seismometers in the study are part of the USArray Transportable Array, a network of temporary seismometers placed across North America as part of the EarthScope project. The array in Alaska and western Canada was completed in the fall of 2017.
[...] These temporary seismic stations are not shielded from magnetic fields, unlike more permanent stations that are often cloaked in mu-metal, a nickel-iron alloy that directs magnetic fields around the instrument's sensors. As a result, "I was blown away by how well you can record magnetic storms across the array," said U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Adam Ringler, a co-author on the SRL paper.
Last month, Ringler and his colleagues published a paper demonstrating how the array's 200-plus seismometers in Alaska can be used to record space weather, potentially augmenting the 13 magnetometers in operation in the state.
Journal Reference:
Carl Tape, Adam T. Ringler, Don L. Hampton. Recording the Aurora at Seismometers across Alaska, Seismological Research Letters (DOI: 10.1785/0220200161)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2020, @03:43PM (4 children)
I've had electronic circuits that were sensitive to sunlight even though there were no optical sensors. Put them in a case and the sunlight sensitivity disappeared.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2020, @03:56PM (2 children)
Now that I think about it, I believe it was a glass diode that was sensitive to sunlight.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2020, @03:58PM
Glass packaged silicon diodes behave as photocells. If they are illuminated with modulated light, their leakage current is modulated by the light; and, if the modulation is 120 Hz (100 Hz in some countries) from line-operated fluorescent lights, the circuit incorporating them will hum.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2020, @04:17PM
GP here, that makes some sense. At about the same time (but on a completely different job) someone showed me some unmounted tilt sensors that were packaged in fingertip-sized clear glass packages. Maybe they were the source of the light interference with the digital inclinometer (which appeared to have an opaque package...but maybe not opaque enough).
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday August 03 2020, @06:21PM
And of course there was the Raspberry Pi that didn't like to be photographed. [sophos.com]
(Actually I don't know if the later models still have that problem.)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.