{"id":73,"date":"2015-03-19T17:40:36","date_gmt":"2015-03-19T17:40:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/54.245.251.220\/?p=73"},"modified":"2023-12-26T22:01:29","modified_gmt":"2023-12-26T22:01:29","slug":"aurorasaurus-tracks-st-patricks-day-storm-on-social-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.aurorasaurus.org\/?p=73","title":{"rendered":"Aurorasaurus Tracks St. Patrick’s Day storm on Social Media"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Nathan Case and Kasha Patel<\/p>\n

\"An<\/a>
An Aurorasaurus user submitted this photo of the aurora in Germany along with a report.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

On Tuesday, March 17, 2015, as people adorned themselves with green clothing and infused their livers with green beer, Earth was experiencing the biggest geomagnetic storm of the last decade\u2014leading to beautiful, widespread aurora around world.<\/p>\n

The red, white and green St. Patrick\u2019s Day aurora was created through a rather fortuitous combination of factors. An explosion on the Sun occurred two days earlier on Sunday, March 15, 2015. The explosion, called a coronal mass ejection (CME), is a blast of large bubbles of gas (plasma) that can create strong geomagnetic disturbances as they collide with the Earth\u2019s magnetic field (known as the magnetosphere).\u00a0More importantly, the magnetic field of this CME was directed southward, opposite to the Earth\u2019s terrestrial field, and the solar wind– a stream of charged particles that flows from the Sun past the Earth — was quite fast due the effects of an earthward pointing coronal hole.<\/p>\n