Magnetic South Pole
Yesterday we sampled nearly on top of the magnetic south pole- we were just 50 nautical miles away. Earth’s core gives the planet a magnetic field like someone stuck a huge, rectangular magnet inside the Earth. The ends of that magnet don’t quite line up with the north and south pole that we see on maps (called the “geographic” poles). The magnetic poles move a little over time, and every few hundred thousand years they suddenly reverse- magnetic south becomes north and vice versa! This magnetic field is what makes compasses work and some animals use it to migrate.
Anyway, we were the closest people in the world to the magnetic south pole yesterday, and the nearest people to us now are a little over 300 miles away. Being so far away from people makes me hyper-aware of just how much my version of “normal” includes humans. I keep seeing streaky clouds and thinking they’re airplane trails but they’re really, really not.
Stuff from the sun hitting Earth’s magnetic field is what causes the polar lights. We saw brilliant southern lights displays for a few nights on our transit south, but we’re too close to the magnetic south pole now to see them anymore. We should get back into a great viewing zone near the end of our expedition.
- Your question: “How dark is it at night at the bottom of the ocean?” Below 200 m, which is the deep sea, it’s nighttime all the time and all the creatures that live there are adapted to live in constant darkness. We worry that our camera lights will blind the deep-sea animals with eyes- seeing our camera lights is like staring into the sun for them since their eyes are designed to see very low light levels made by other animals in the deep.
🧲 Virginia
The southern lights, with me and Holly in the bottom right of the photo. Taken by Victoria Vandersommen.
But this is what the southern lights actually looked like- HA. Our phone cameras sense things differently than we see them, plus they’re programmed to make a pretty image sometimes more than return what it looks like in real life. I adjusted this image to be more like slightly tinted fog, which is how I experienced it.
The thing I can’t share well and the reason everyone runs to the bow even without it being intensely colored in real life is the huge scale of it- it’s like an imax movie of organized fog that drapes across the very visible milky way and sunbeams all the way from the port to the starboard horizon. It changes so gradually that you almost don’t notice, and somehow also so fast that it surprises you if you look away and then look back. It’s the ultimate grand-scale nature experience.