The Aurora Has Been Drinking

For those with clear skies, you might wanna step outside your teepee tonight. The aurora borealis may make a rare appearance at lower latitudes given the sun's continuing dip into southern polarity. Science boy says, "HUH?" Follow me, Timmy.


The sun and the earth are basically sympatico right now, electromagnetically, like bar magnets that order the same drink, opening the earth up to more of the sun's solar wind. The earth/sun bar magnets typically repel, one ordering a Manhattan while the other orders a Jaegermeister, though this is increasingly being reversed -- with BOTH of them ordering scotch, the SAME SCOTCH, spooky -- as the sun's polarity flips to the south and everyone starts drinking mint juleps, wherewasi? Oh. The earth's magnetic field typically REPELS, but when the sun flips south and starts eating grits instead of hashed browns, the earth starts jonesin for the sun's Elvis cologne and opens up like a... well, never mind. This means that no matter what the sun's doing, the earth's magnetic field doesn't stop it, quite the opposite, because the earth has seen, "CLAMBAKE," like 979 times and it's READY. Because of this, the solar wind is gonna stream into the upper atmosphere like Dick Cheney on a Nixon, and scotch sales are gonna SKYROCKET. Should be an incredible event... if anyone remembers it. Did you get all that? Kinda makes your head and the sky go all Logan's Run, like this...

NOTE: You have to wonder (yes, you do), what will this HUGE influx of energy do to the earth's inner gin-and-tectonic clockworks? What with all the high energy particles flowing into the poles, Da-da would expect the inner to heat up and the outer (the floaty mantle) to get very slippery. This means more hot 3-D tectonic action (you love that) and possibly even increased volcanism -- but most definitely more earthquakage (check all the recent 6+ quakes along the Ring of Fire). You heard it here first. Needless to say, we're living the Chinese astrogeophysical curse: may you live during interesting thermodynamic times (not that any of our physical "laws" mean anything).