NASA spends a lot of time researching the Earth and its surrounding space environment. One particular feature of interest are the Van Allen belts, so much so that NASA built special probes to study them! They’ve now discovered a protective bubble they believe has been generated by human transmissions in the VLF range.
VLF transmissions cover the 3-30 kHz range, and thus bandwidth is highly limited. VLF hardware is primarily used to communicate with submarines, often to remind them that, yes, everything is still fine and there’s no need to launch the nukes yet. It’s also used for navigation and broadcasting time signals.
It seems that this human transmission has created a barrier of sorts in the atmosphere that protects it against radiation from space. Interestingly, the outward edge of this “VLF Bubble” seems to correspond very closely with the innermost edge of the Van Allen belts caused by Earth’s magnetic field. What’s more, the inner limit of the Van Allan belts now appears to be much farther away from the Earth’s surface than it was in the 1960s, which suggests that man-made VLF transmissions could be responsible for pushing the boundary outwards.
Overall, this seems like an accidental, but potentially positive effect of human activity – the barrier protects the Earth from potentially harmful radiation. NASA’s YouTube video on the topic suggests that understanding this mechanism better could enable us to protect our satellites and space vehicles from some of the harmful effects of the space environment.
NASA does a lot of high-end research – like the EM drive that’s got a lot of people very confused right now.
[Thanks bty!]
So we’re protecting ourselves from radiation by emitting more radiation?
You are comparing shouting at someone vs shooting someone with a shotgun.
ionizing vs non-ionizing radiation, if I had a nickel for every time I have had to explain this
which nickel isotope?
I’m fully aware difference between the two, but they’re both EM radiation, so isn’t my statement still correct?
If you are only looking at X-rays and gamma rays,
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b6/OSHA_radiation_spectrum.jpg
then yes, but that would mean that you are totally ignoring all the high energy charged particles ejected from our local star (Alpha particles and beta particles would be included here) and all the Cosmic radiation originating from outside the Solar System. We are shielded from most the high energy EM by our atmosphere. The same can not be said for the cosmic rays which are composed primarily of high-energy protons and atomic nuclei travelling near the speed of light with around a million times more energy when compared to the highest energy gamma rays.
The earth’s magnetic field deflects the charged particles.
A Canadian Nickel is worth more in nickel value for a certain year range.
No, we are emitting the right vibration to repel bad vibrations :)
I’m picking up a good vibrations.
She’s giving me excitations.
Ohh ohhh oh. Good vibrations.
see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schumann_resonances
I followed your link over a year after your post, and learned something new today!
Thanks! And thanks HaD!
Hmmmm, interesting, can “Van Allan” belts be detected around other planets around other stars, if so a “fat” belt might be a positive indication of a technically advanced civilization.
How would one detect a fat belt? We just found ours!
It would jiggle in all the right ways.
Usually by the original notches being stretched, and new notches added that are not as evenly spaced :P
Extra holes added in towards the end
Belt up you lot!
Planet doesn’t move. Just sits there while everything else goes around it.
We just noticed the possible changes because of “recently” launched Van Allen probes, you can’t detect the belts unless you’re actually ON them. So no, we can’t look for them on other planets as indications of advanced civilizations. We’d spot the city lights by night before we can detect any changes to space environment.
Unless they lived underground, in which case something like this (or maybe thermal/x-ray type imaging) would be pretty helpful.
Well, if they are using VLF enough to change their radiation belt, we might as well just detect the VLF directly, unless we’re talking about a recently extinct civilization, as the changes shouldn’t last long.
Detection is more probable on other frequencies, because a directional antenna in VLF range with enough directivity will be enormous.
[SQ2KTN] use a phased array, several probes with their own IPS (interstellar positioning system).
We need more probes…
What about that star that is dimming in an “unpredictable pattern”? Maybe we found a civilization! Probably dead by now, but the signal has been sent and what better way than dimming a star?!
[notarealemail]
Sort of like when a bartender flickers the lights signifying that it is almost closing time…
I’m afraid that observing radiation belts isn’t possible from distance, you’ll need to launch a probe to such planet to measure them. But if you can get a probe to an exoplanet…
Perhaps we can detect Compton scattering on starlight passing through Van Allen – like belts of exoplanets? It would be minuscule, because particles in the belts are mostly much heavier then electrons, but still …
Look for belt and braces for truly advanced civilizations.
Would the fat version be a Kirstie Allen belt?
B^)
Or a particularly loud version be a Van Halen Belt?
This video was obviously produced by someone who skimmed the paper and found something that would be cool to make a video about. It’s also mostly composed of BS.
The paper is just a review of all the ways humans have been affecting the Van Allen belts, like exploding nuclear bombs in it. It does go over the possible changes in the belts due to VLF transmissions, but it in no way posits that that change has any positive or negative impacts, as the belts are quite volatile and the changes quite light.
It’s bad enough that NASA is producing such misleading videos, please don’t go propagating those without at least checking the sources :-P
Where’s the actual research paper? I can’t find it and don’t know what to look for. I’d really like to go to the source, not the media. Thanks for leaving your comment.
This is a link to the paper: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11214-017-0357-5 (currently down)
DOI 10.1007/s11214-017-0357-5
If you don’t have access to a subscription for it… there are other means around if you know where to look for… (search around for sci-hub)
It’s been on arxiv for about a month: https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.03390 . No need for sci-hub this time. And yeah, I read it the week it came out and didn’t even notice the bits about the VLF radio/magnetosphere interactions. It’s almost entirely about nuclear bombs at high altitude.
Thanks so much! I look forward to actually reading the science, not the media’s false interpretation of the science.
So we’re doomed.
Saved?
Oh! Tinfoil hats are back in style!?
I wonder what protected us before radio…
God but according to which church who knows man also created that one.
The tinfoil hat industry always finds a way to keep its business running.
Anyone else noticed that the picture kinda looks like a type of finger spinner?
*Hits blunt* the entire universe is a giant fidget spinner woooaaahhh
“Now we are all sons of bitches.”
That video doesn’t make any sense. Is that fake news or something?
summer temps let loose at the JPL
Anthropogenic space climate change?
Absolutely. Space weather affects the jet stream, but only ‘conspiracy theorists’ are willing to talk about it.
+1 to George Noory, Clyde Lewis, and about 6 other radio hosts.
Oh come on, surely you don’t believe we can’t have a 100% ability to completely simulate climate change with computer models and directly attribute it to anthropogenic CO2/VLF. /s
Actually it was from the early observations of physicists on how these high powered VLF transmitters interact with radiation belt particle populations that the hypothesis of Transmitter Induced Ozone Depletion was formed.
You can view this in ‘VLF Slot Induced Electron Precipitation’ Vampola et.al. 1977.. very interesting read. It was from this early research that intentional modification of radiation belts was born. It’s now called Radiation Belt Remediation and you can find a good SciShow YouTube vid on it. What that video doesn’t tell you is that according to Dr. Allison Jaynes a full scale clean up could cause heaps of Nitrogen and Hydrogen oxides to cause ozone depletion. She mentions this in a recent article: ‘US Test Ways to Sweep Space Clean of Radiation’
I’ve been researching this since 2007 and Dr. Jaynes used one of my diagrams in her 2018 presentation on Cutting Edge Radiation Belt Research at the National Academy of Sciences. I share research with her occasionally and she’s helping me to source a mm-wave spectrometer for research proposal on VLF Induced Ozone Depletion.
Transmitter Induced Ozone Depletion was recently verified using the SURA scientific transmitter using mm~wave spectrometer.
I think Anthropogenic Space Weather could be a small part of the puzzle in Climate Change, but atmospheric CO2 is also quite significant.
Does anyone else keep reading “Van Allen” as “Van Halen”? ;)
! HAHAHA yes!
I wonder, how are they so sure this is caused by VLF and not something else? We do many other things that could affect the van allen belts. Like other radio bands that make it into space, some upper atmosphere nuclear tests, many satellites and space debris floating around etc..
“I wonder, how are they so sure this is caused by VLF and not something else? We do many other things that could affect the Van Allen belts.”
We don’t overcharge for them.
Now the first question that comes to my mind: could we use this discovery to create a ‘force field’ around Mars in order to compensate for the lack of magnetic field?
How about the space craft flying to Mars?
Are we seeing the start of the development of particle / energy shielding?
This discovery is doubly useful.
1. First, it provides an additional rationale for creating a backup to GPS called eLoran, using very powerful VLF transmitters that take over timing and navigation when GPS goes down. The more we depend on GPS alone, the more vulnerable we become.
2. Second, we could build into these VLF transmitters the ability to elevate their power for a few hours or days. Yes, the expensive tubes in their finals might burn out more quickly, but if that might spare us from the enormous destructive impact of another Carrington Event (1859). That storm took out telegraph lines. Imagine what its equivalent today would do to our power and communications systems.
“Studies have shown that a solar storm of this magnitude occurring today would likely cause more widespread problems for a modern and technology-dependent society.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859
Interesting I would love to see this. Unfortunately this would be a large device. I will keep my GPSDO
for now.
.
“Human” made, riiiiight…
Everyone who reads Larry Niven knows that the gods created a shield around the Earth to keep us from performing magic. Well… Now we know why we don’t have Atlantis, floating castles, dragons and unicorns anymore: VLF transmissions. Thanks NASA!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Goes_Away
;-)
===Jac
Props for the Niven reference.