The Northern Lights within reach

Published on December 24, 2024 at 08:57. / Modified on December 24, 2024 at 08:58.

3 mins. reading

In May, then in October this year, the sky lit up spectacularly across Europe, all the way to the heart of Switzerland. Northern lights of rare intensity have in fact descended much further south than usual. “I witnessed my first aurora borealis, in France, on the night of March 13 to 14, 1989,” says scientific mediator Patrick Lécureuil, who is publishing this fall a small, richly documented work on this natural phenomenon*. That night, the magnetic storm associated with the aurora caused electrical distribution networks to shut down in the eastern United States and Canada. More than 20 million people were left in the dark.

In his work, Patrick Lécureuil says that almost 2000 years ago, Pliny the Elder had mentioned the aurora in his Natural stories: “fires the color of blood, heading towards the Earth. Nothing is more terrible than this phenomenon in the eyes of terrified mortals. […] For me, I believe that these meteors appear, like the rest, at regular times, and that they are independent of the varied causes, the fruit of a subtle imagination, to which most attribute them.

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