Ruminations on Alaskan Marvels from 41 Years Ago

The late E. L. Keithahn, one time curator of the Alaska Territorial Museum, wrote an-article for the July, 1942 issue of The Alaska Sportsman entitled "There's Magic in the Arctic." It makes interesting reading, not only from a historical viewpoint, but also for his sometimes quaint observations. Here are some excerpts:

"On those Arctic nights when the common auroral arch seems to expand, break up and dance overhead in myriad flaming colors, one experiences a mild electric shock about the ears and hair that is easily distinguished from the nipping of the frost. The air becomes heavily charged with ozone which penetrates the nostrils like chlorine and suggests the smell of blood at a fresh kill. A muffled, swishing sound accompanies these displays. Small Eskimo boys band together and frolic about on the snow attempting to imitate the ominous sounds from overhead. It would be difficult, indeed, to convince these small boys that they weren't hearing anything. No doubt the muffled sounds heard in the silent Arctic night are actually reverberations of tremendous claps of auroral thunder many miles above the earth.

"There seems to be a relationship between the aurora and the weather or, strictly speaking, the winds. If it is calm and very cold, the arch is low. As the wind comes up, the arch rises, and if it approaches a gale, the arch seems to break up at times."

And on mirages: "I recall seeing a beautiful, four-masted schooner appear one morning about two miles offshore (Seward Peninsula) in a sea littered with floe ice. And then, right before my eyes it simply faded out. This kept on intermittently for four days; then the real ship did pull into the roadstead, dropped its hook, and the natives went out in their umiaks to barter. When the trading was completed we saw that same ship sail proudly away to the north on the very tip of the masts! It was another antic of mirage."

"Then there are the frost quakes. It appears the earth can stand just so much freezing, then, due to expansion, something has got to give. As the earth cracks there is a local earthquake, giving the occupants of an igloo directly over it quite a scare, yet not even disturbing their next door neighbor.

"The Arctic will-o'-the-wisp is a ball of fuzzy light about the size of a small haystack that silently plunks down in front of you some nights when you are walking along, disappears like magic, appears perhaps behind you, glows with a cold, white light, then bounces away. Now visible, now invisible, it appears and reappears as if it were too hot to alight and not sure it existed anyway."

Keithahn details other unusual phenomena such as sun dogs and light pillars, which are readily explainable, as are the frost quakes and mirages. There are also accounts which defy explanation such as that of the will-o'-the-wisp and stories of narrow white paths extending before people on pitch black nights.

As for the auroral sounds, scientists still tend to be skeptical, although there are so many reports of the phenomenon on record, it must be that such sounds, illusory or not, are simply not understood. Suffice to say that they have never been instrumentally recorded.

A connection between auroras and the wind, however, is extremely speculative, and as for the auroral sounds being due to "auroral thunder" well...

Keithan can certainly be forgiven his stab at an explanation. Incredibly, it has only been for about the last ten years that the mechanics of the aurora have become reasonably understood.