This
past week we in Helsinki have apparently been treated to a display of Northern
Lights, or aurora borealis for the scientifically
inclined. I say “apparently”, since I
haven’t been lucky enough to see anything through the cover of low clouds
that’s been hanging over Helsinki every time I’ve remembered to look up at the
sky.
As
with any event that requires peering up at the night sky, Helsinki has the huge
disadvantage of almost never having an actual view of the night sky. Compared, that is, with other parts of the
world. Check out the night sky in the arid
American West sometime and you realize just how much of the heavens (the Milky
Way!) folks back in Helsinki have never even seen.
 |
| Aurora over Malmesjaur Lake, Swedish Lapland. Photo: Jerry Magnum Porsbjer |
But
when it comes to the Northern Lights, Helsinki is doubly cursed, because here in
Finland the ghostly lights synonymous with the Far North are rarely visible
this far south. While I have seen nice
displays of revontulet (the Finnish
name, which literally means “foxfires”) a few times in Lapland, I’ve seen them in
Helsinki only once or twice in all the time I’ve lived here, and even then they
were hardly visible.
That
might be surprising for a city sitting at a latitude of 60 degrees, closer to
the North Pole than well over 99.7% of everyone else on Earth. The thing is, the Northern Lights don’t have
anything to do with the pole at the top of the world. The aurora,
which is created when the solar wind streaming from the sun collides with Earth’s
atmosphere, is spread out in a ring around the magnetic North Pole, which – not tethered to the actual North Pole –
has a tendency to wander around. For the
last century or so, it’s been located somewhere in the Arctic wastes of Canada,
moving toward Russia. That’s why those
of us who occasionally carry compasses to different parts of the world have to
adjust them from time to time.
It’s
also why the Northern Lights are more visible in North America than in Finland. They even sometimes make an appearance in my
home state of Georgia, like this past week when a powerful solar storm pushed
them as far south as both Atlanta and Helsinki.
Only, ironically enough, the folks in Georgia had a better chance of actually
seeing them.
 |
| Northern Lights with a rare blue streak. Photo: Varjisakka |
