Northern Lights

Northern Lights

  • Submitted By: bbutterflyy
  • Date Submitted: 06/13/2009 9:10 PM
  • Category: Science
  • Words: 853
  • Page: 4
  • Views: 1

The Aurora Borealis, also sometimes called the Northern Lights is one of the earth's most beautiful phenomenons. The mystery of how this magical light show could exist has absorbed people for years. The cause has been proven as of late, causing lots of excitement in the scientific community. Until then, there have been hundreds of theories. They generally occur in the ionosphere, and contrary to what most people think, there is aurora at the South Pole as well, called Aurora Australis. So much attention has been given to these auroras, that NASA has now funded a mission called THEMIS (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms), which involves five identical satelite probes launched into the sky to study the aurora. The Aurora Borealis are a vivid and fascinating phenomenon, and humans are trying persistently to solve this mystery; The Northern Lights.
The Aurora has had many mystical myths and legends told about it since it was first seen. One of the old Norse legends was that glaciers were powerful and could store energy. This energy then allowed them to become flourescent, lighting up the light sky. Finnish people call the Northern Lights “revontulet” which translates to “fox fires”. This was related to a story told amongst them of foxes made of fire who caused the Aurora Borealis by whisking sparks up with their tails. A less common, but interesting one is a Scandinavian myth that the Northern Lights were caused by reflections of the large swarms of herring in the sea. The Scandinavian name for the lights translates to “herring flash”. The Sami people believed that mocking the Aurora would cause the lights to descend and kill them. Many many different races believed that the lights were spirits or ancestors dancing. Examples of these people are the Algonquin, Salteaus and Inuit First Nations people, the Scottish, the Latvians, and the Estonians. My personal favorite is the Russian belief that the Aurora Borealis was the...

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