Tsunami lit up the heavens

[n2doc]

Web edition : Thursday, June 16th, 2011 Text Size


DOING THE WAVE In this image taken by a camera in Hawaii, large-scale, glowing atmospheric ripples wash over the Hawaiian Islands (outlined in blue) following the March 11 Japan earthquake and tsunami. The red line is the tsunami’s location on the ocean surface.Jonathan Makela/Univ. of Illinois


Japan’s recent monster earthquake did more than jolt the island nation and send a tsunami racing across the Pacific Ocean. Hundreds of kilometers overhead, that tsunami also lit up the atmosphere in celestial glowing ripples.

In the first picture of its kind, scientists photographed these “airglow” ripples as they washed over Hawaii hours after the quake. The report will appear in an upcoming Geophysical Research Letters.

“It’s just total serendipity that we got this measurement,” says team leader Jonathan Makela, a space scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “It’s a really neat example of how the environment is coupled together.”

When the magnitude-9.0 quake ruptured the seafloor off eastern Japan on March 11, it displaced water that started rushing outward as a tsunami. Over the open ocean those waves were just centimeters high, but that small shift was enough to displace the air above the water’s surface. The result: dense waves of atmospheric particles propagating upward.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/331412/title/Tsunami_lit_up_the_heavens__

[denbot]

1. Wow.

Never in a million years would I have thought a wave centermeters high could impact the ionosphere.

[angstlessk]

2. The site is down...cannot get it to load, even from google!

[n2doc]

3. Worked for me just now n/t

[angstlessk]

4. I now see the photo that did not show up before and when I tried to show it the site would not load

It works now...thanks!