"Dazzling Drapery of Color and Light" Returns
Made visible by the return of dark nights, the aurora borealis is again performing above Alaska. The start of aurora-watching season comes at a good time for Syun-Ichi Akasofu, one of the world's foremost experts on the northern lights. He is now updating Aurora Borealis, The Amazing Northern Lights, a book published by the Alaska Geographic Society in 1979.
Akasofu is the director of the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He has studied the aurora since 1958, when he arrived in Fairbanks from Japan with a pair of skis and a desire to learn all he could about the aurora borealis. In the 44 years since, he has helped unravel some of the aurora's mysteries.
In the new version of the aurora book, which Alaska Geographic will publish in 2002, Akasofu will include early explorers' written accounts of the aurora. He gathered most of their words 30 years ago. While his son attended piano lessons at the university every Saturday, Akasofu used the three hours of waiting to pore through the Rasmuson Library's Alaska and Polar Regions section. He unearthed a few aurora-related nuggets.
In 1911, polar explorer Frederick Cook wrote that he was "spiritually intoxicated" by the aurora:
"The divine fingers of the aurora, that unseen and intangible thing of flame, who comes from her mysterious throne to smile upon a benighted world, began to touch the sky with glittering, quivering lines of glowing silver."
George Kennar, while exploring Siberia in 1871, wrote about an aurora he saw outside his canvas tent:
"No other natural phenomenon is so grand, so mysterious, so terrible in its unearthly splendor as this; the veil which conceals from mortal eyes the glory of the eternal throne seems drawn aside, and the awed beholder is lifted out of the atmosphere of his daily life into the immediate presence of God."
With no explanation for the aurora, explorers mused on its origins. In 1894, Edward Ellis wrote:
" . . . a ribbon, combining several vivid colors, quivered, danced, and streamed far beyond the zenith with a wary appearance that suggested that some giant, standing upon the extreme northern point of the Earth, had suddenly unrolled this marvelous ribbon and was waving it in the eyes of an awestruck world."
Searchers looking for the lost Northwest Passage expedition of Sir John Franklin failed to find Franklin, but they found the aurora. In 1853, Lieutenant W.H. Cooper wrote: "Few nights passed without a greater or less display of the Aurora Borealis, that wondrous phenomenon whose existence after more than half a century of research is yet unaccounted for satisfactorily."
"Will man ever decipher the characters which the Aurora Borealis draws in fire on the dark sky?" Sophus Tromholt wrote in 1885. "Will his eye ever penetrate the mysteries of Creation which are hidden behind this dazzling drapery of color and light?"
Akasofu sums up current knowledge of the aurora in the book, which will include new photos taken by Fairbanks photographer Jack Finch, and Jan Curtis, a former climatologist at the Geophysical Institute who came to Alaska in 1995 because he wanted to capture the aurora on film. Curtis recently realized a photographer's dream by selling one of his aurora photos to National Geographic magazine.
