By Kasha Patel, The Washington PostThe northern lights, aurora borealis, illuminate the sky above the village of Akaslompolo in Kolari, beyond the Arctic Circle, Finnish Lapland, Sunday, Feb. 11, 2024.
In a new study, Asikainen and his graduate student Veera Juntunen found that auroral activity altered electricity consumption by as much as 14 percent in Finland. Very high geomagnetic activity led to a reduction of as much as 600 gigawatt hours of consumption compared to when activity was average - about the monthly heating energy of about 330,000 Finnish households, Asikainen said.
Nobody knows all the nitty-gritty details yet, but Asikainen said the journey begins where our upper atmosphere meets space. Charged particles from the sun aimed at Earth can temporarily disturb the protective magnetic bubble surrounding our planet called the magnetosphere. Solar particles can travel along Earth’s magnetic field lines into our upper atmosphere, where it excites molecules and releases photons of light that we see as an aurora.
Residents in northern Europe and the United States know the polar vortex all too well, and there is another in the southern hemisphere. The stratosphere’s polar vortex is a whirlpool of cold air blowing around the polar region during winter. A weaker polar vortex undulates and can unleash Arctic blasts to lower latitudes. A strong, tightly wound polar vortex keeps the Arctic air at the pole.
“I was very surprised to see how good the correlation of power consumption with breaking of the polar vortex was,” space scientist Tuija Pulkkinen, who was not involved in the research, said in an email. Most people live and consume energy in southern Finland, so she noted the effects of the polar vortex were felt all the way down to the mid-latitudes.