Scientists probe link between coronal mass ejections and the sun’s interior motion

October 8, 2012 – SUN - After forty long years of debates and theories and counter-theories, the community of solar physics scientists has still failed to come to a consensus about what causes the sun’s powerful coronal mass ejections (CMEs). CMEs have profound “space weather” effects on land based power grids and satellites in near-Earth geo-space. An international team of scientists explains the mysterious physical mechanisms behind the origin of CMEs in a study published in Nature Physics. The results, based on computer simulations, expose the intricate connections between CMEs and motions in the sun’s interior. This new data could lead to better forecasting of hazardous space weather conditions. Clouds of magnetic fields and plasma – a hot gas composed of charged particles – comprise CMEs. The most powerful and fastest of these events explode from the sun at more than a million miles per hour, with an energy release more powerful than the entire worldwide stockpile of nuclear weapons. “By studying CMEs we learn not only about the drivers of space weather but also about the structure of the atmosphere of the sun and other sun-like stars,” says lead author Ilia Roussev of the Yunnan Astronomical Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Disruptions in power grids, satellites that operate GPS or telecommunication systems, pose threats to astronauts in space, cause spectacular auroras, and lead to the rerouting of flights over the polar regions are all effects of geomagnetic storms caused by CMEs. These storms happen when a solar eruption hits Earth’s protective magnetic bubble, or magnetosphere. The study provides an explanation of the origin of these super speed ejections of magnetized plasma and the associated X-ray emissions, demonstrating a fundamental connection between the magnetic processes of the sun’s interior and the formation of CMEs. “Through this type of computer modeling we are able to understand how invisible bundles of magnetic field rise from under the surface of the sun into interplanetary space and propagate towards Earth with potentially damaging results”, says SSC researcher Noé Lugaz of the UNH Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space. He adds, “These fundamental phenomena cannot be observed even with the most advanced instruments on board NASA satellites but they can be revealed by numerical simulations.” Accurate forecasting of solar eruptions and being able to predict their impact on Earth has long been a goal of solar physicists. “The model described here enables us not only to capture the magnetic evolution of the CME, but also to calculate the increased X-ray flux directly, which is a significant advantage over the existing models,” asserts the authors.

October 8, 2012 – EARTH – The entire outermost part of Earth may be wandering over the planet’s whirling molten core, new research suggests. Knowing whether the Earth’s outer layers are roaming in this manner is key to understanding the big picture of how the planet’s surface is evolving overall, scientists added. At various times in Earth’s history, the planet’s solid exterior — its crust and mantle layers — has apparently drifted over the planet’s spinning core. To picture this, imagine that a peach’s flesh somehow became detached from a peach’s pit and was free to move about over it. This movement of the Earth’s outer layers is known as “true polar wander.” It differs from the motion of the individual tectonic plates making up Earth’s crust, known as tectonic drift, or the motions of Earth’s magnetic pole, called apparent polar wander. Past research suggested the Earth experienced true polar wander during the early Cretaceous period that lasted from 100 million to 120 million years ago. Determining when, in which direction and at what rate true polar wander is taking place depends on having stable landmarks against which one can observe the motion of Earth’s outer shell, much like one can tell a cloud is moving by seeing if its position has changed relative to its surroundings. Volcanic “hot spots,” or areas of recurrent volcanism, are one potential landmark. Geologists have suggested these are created by mantle plumes, giant jets of hot rock buoying straight upward from near the Earth’s core. Mantle plumes are thought to create long island chains such as the Hawaiian Islands as they sear tectonic plates drifting overhead. Scientists have treated hot spots as stationary features for decades. The idea was that material surrounding the mantle plumes roil about to form structures known as convection cells that kept the plumes straight and fixed in place. Later on, however, researchers began suggesting that mantle plumes could move about slightly, caught as they are in the flowing mantle layer under the crust. ”From this point of view, the plumes are expected to move, bend and get distorted by the ‘mantle wind,’ resulting in hot spot drift over geologic time,” said researcher Pavel Doubrovine, a geophysicist at the University of Oslo in Norway. By allowing hot spot positions to meander slowly, Doubrovine and his colleagues have devised computer simulations that better match observations of the chains of islands created by each hot spot. “Estimating hot spot drift in the geological past is not a trivial task,” Doubrovine told OurAmazingPlanet. “It requires substantial modeling efforts.”


Temperature flux: The scientists then compared the way the Earth’s outermost layers drifted in relation to the planet’s axis of spin. The Earth’s magnetic field is aligned with the core’s axis of rotation, and researchers can tell how Earth’s magnetic field was oriented in the past by analyzing ancient rock. Magnetic minerals in molten rock can behave like compasses, aligning with Earth’s magnetic field lines, an orientation that gets frozen in place once the rock solidifies. Using their simulations and the magnetic field rock record, the scientists identified three new potential instances of true polar wander over the past 90 million years. These include two cases in which the Earth’s solid outermost layers traveled back and forth by nearly 9 degrees off Earth’s axis of spin from 40 million to 90 million years ago. Moreover, the researchers suggest that Earth’s outer shell has been undergoing true polar wander for the past 40 million years, slowly rotating at a rate of 0.2 degrees every million years. Researchers suspect true polar wander is caused by shifting of matter within the mantle, due, for instance, to variations in temperature and composition. However, “we don’t know yet what specific tectonic events may have triggered the specific episodes of true polar wander that we identified,” Doubrovine said. These new details regarding true polar wander could help shed light on what triggers it. In the future, the researchers plan to look even further in the past at how the planet’s outermost layers have changed. Doubrovine and his colleagues Bernhard Steinberger and Trond Torsvik detailed their findings online Sept. 11 in the Journal of Geophysical Research — Solid Earth.

“Consequently, we can draw a direct correlation between interior planetary thermal anomalies, magnetic polar migration, and increases in volcanism and large earthquake events. Large earthquakes are typically grouped in clusters because the event that most often was an impetus for them, like a thermal anomaly, also represents a cyclical flux in gradient.” –The 7th Protocol, page 122