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The Substorm is a thing obscure We cannot make it out for sure But physicists with lots of nerve Fill in details they can't observe They see in it their own grand visions Of tearing modes with no collisions That squeeze away the plasma sheet To make opposing fluxes meet And in their merging, oh so swift Great plasmoids are cut adrift Or else the boundary is unfirm It likes to shimmy, twist and turn And as it moves in fast pulsation Gives the storm's acceleration Or maybe fireballs explode Or all comes from some hybrid mode Or maybe field line reconnection Is driven by the tail's convection Or by a catastrophe thermal Or waves with features quite abnormal... The satellites that cross the tail Can never see such fine details But scientists who ought to know Assure us that it must be so. Oh, let us never, never doubt What nobody is sure about! |
| [A guide for the perplexed: A magnetic substorm is an impulsive release of energy in the extended magnetic field of the Earth ("magnetosphere"), dragged out into a long nightside ("tail") by the solar wind. It manifests itself by a sudden burst of polar aurora and large electric currents in the Earth's ionosphere. Its mechanism has given rise to speculations (hinted at by the poem), but from isolated satellites occasionally traversing the tail it is hard to tell (here are some possible remedies). The poem is adapted from "The Microbe" by Belloc and shares the last two lines.] |
Author and Curator: Dr. David P. Stern
Mail to Dr.Stern: david("at" symbol)phy6.org .
Last updated 1 June 2007