Storms in Earth’s upper atmosphere sometimes turn on more than just the aurora, inducing currents in buried pipelines, power grids and undersea cables.

Photo by Ned Rozell.

On cold winter nights long ago, Harvey Gilliland of Petersburg sometimes woke to the buzz of an alarm mounted on the wall of his kitchen. He kicked off the blanket, got dressed, pulled on his rubber boots, and strolled three city blocks to the building in which he worked.

After Gilliland, an electronics technician, twisted a few knobs to restore normal power to an underwater communications cable, the buzzer stopped. The noise was there to alert him to excessive current on the cable’s power system.

The sounding rocket released bright puffs of tri-methyl aluminum, which scientists track from the ground to study winds near the lower boundary of space. The streak on the bottom right is formed by chemicals that have been moved and distorted by winds and turbulence.

Photo Courtesy Carl Andersen

On a clear, cold night two winters ago in Fort Yukon, Carl Andersen watched a rocket he helped design pierce the upper atmosphere. He and three other scientists shot pictures as the rocket ejected bright puffs of chemicals in an inverted V formation more than 60 miles up.

“They were the brightest things in the sky,” Andersen said from his office at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Syun-Ichi Akasofu in his office.

Photos by Ned Rozell.

Sometimes, after idling in the sky for hours as a greenish glow, the aurora catches fire, erupting toward the magnetic north pole in magnificent chaos that can last for three hours. “Substorms,” as space physicists call them, can happen two or three times each night.

The man who came up with that name half a century ago has, with a former student he once mentored, come up with a new theory on the location of heavenly energy for these auroras.