I'm afraid I didn't see the extremely rare northern lights event over the past few days, but in honor of this event, I wanted to share a tidbit of my novel which deals explicitly with this subject.
Late in August of 1859, a cluster of sunspots, any one of which could contain a dozen Earths, wrenched and twisted their way across the solar surface. A contortion of energy created it, with the unfathomable strength of the opposing magnetic fields warping the surface into a solar strain that had persisted for many Earth days.
Such a phenomenon was commonplace on the sun, and were it never to resolve, the star would have shredded itself to pieces long ago. Instead, as they always did, the magnetic fields finally snapped back into alignment, and the release of this tension created a violent expulsion of matter whose size and speed would have boggled the minds of the people of Earth, had they been made aware of these celestial grapplings taking place ninety-three million miles away.
Countless billions of tons of plasma were hurled away from the solar atmosphere, traveling faster than the solar wind and accelerating by the moment. A few days earlier, a similar yet smaller ejection had taken place, plowing out a clear path between the sun and the Earth, thus making the journey of this new coronal mass devoid of anything that might hinder its passage.
As the accompanying one hundred thousand miles tall prominence above the sun’s surface collapsed back to the photosphere, the massive plasma cloud gained distance from its source, gathering speed through space until it was streaking toward the third planet at a pace of thousands of miles each second with the collective energy of ten thousand atomic bombs. In spite of the hundred million mile journey, the gargantuan blob of electrically-charged plasma reached Earth in less than eighteen hours.
When the mass slammed into Earth’s own protective magnetosphere, the ferocity of the encounter mashed the terrestrial shield and propelled magnetic flux lines far to the other side, stretching the cosmic tail by tens of millions of miles. Although it had already begun to pass through the Earth’s orbit, the rest of the fast-moving plasma stretched on for many millions of miles more, subjecting the planet’s powerful natural shield to long-lasting pressures it rarely was required to endure.
Until that very moment, none of the one billion human inhabitants of the planet knew of these happenings, nor did any of them possess an awareness of the magnetic forcefield floating silently in space which made their lives possible in the first place. Knowledge of such benevolent phenomena would not be worked out for decades to come.
Over the course of the coming hours, though, strange happenings would occur across Earth, and eventually hundreds of millions of people would puzzle over the consequences of this incomprehensible curiosity. Humanity’s ignorance of the cause and its effects made no difference. The results were in front of their eyes.
The first of those to realize something was amiss were the telegraph operators. Sparks begin to shoot from the contact points where the telegraph connected to the transmission cable. The wires turned hot. Chemical-coated papers which were stacked near the devices burst into flames, and the alarmed personnel frantically tamped down the unexpected fires in their offices with coats, hats, and newspapers.
Some of the more clever operators eventually figured out that, for reasons no one could quite understand, they could still manage to send and receive messages, but only after disconnecting the battery usually required for the telegraph to function in the first place. It was as if the energy required to make the machine operate was being drawn out of thin air.
Over the next couple of days, millions more people become aware of this plasma assault in a manner more pleasant than having their fingers scorched with unexpected electricity. In the middle of the night, the star-speckled blackness the people of Earth usually saw above their heads was mysteriously replaced with the appearance of shimmering curtains of eerie light.
For inhabitants of the very farthest reaches of the northern and southern poles of the planet, these aurorae were nothing new, but for those in Colorado, Germany, Cuba, Australia, South Carolina, or any of the other homes to hundreds of millions of people who had never witnessed such a sight, it was a singularly novel experience. This glorious marvel was unprecedented and never to be experienced by any of them again.
Thanks to the heavenly glow, Bostonians were able to read the newspaper in the middle of the night. Gold miners in the Rockies sleeping in their tents awoke to what they thought was the morning sun, so they started a new day to hunt for ore. Nocturnal beachcombers on the Eastern seaboard of the United States gazed at the ocean’s horizon during a midnight sky, ablaze as it was with billowing shimmers, and thousands of seashells at their feet glowed like hot coals.
Yet, in a couple of days, it was all over. No harm came from the strange event, with the exception of some charred wires that needed replacing, not to mention the mildly injured and traumatized personnel at the Western Union. Among the more pious citizens of the country, chatter about Armageddon and the apocalypse fell away as swiftly as it commenced.
The luminous spectacle was a gift from the heavens, and it occurred at a time when there was no price to pay for the show. The whole of humanity had been dunked into a cosmic electrical bath, and the only lasting consequence were countless stories about a few nights of transcendent heavenly beauty, as if God himself had decided to become an artist for the human race, using the sky above them as His canvas.
It is sometimes a blessing not to comprehend what is happening in one’s very midst, and it is almost always better to be lucky than smart.
