THE AURORAL ZONE

There’s a region on Earth where the skies play regular host to the Northern Lights

Earth has a magnetic field rather like a bar magnet in space. The geomagnetic field is fundamental to the creation of the aurora, where charged particles are accelerated down magnetic field lines into Earth’s atmosphere, so auroral activity occurs in a ring centred on the magnetic poles.

The auroral zone is the land above which we generally see the aurora, by definition at midnight. It is a band demarcated by magnetic latitude, stretching approximately 1,300km between around 61°N and 73°N magnetic, based on probability. Magnetic latitude differs from geographic latitude because Earth’s magnetic axis is not orientated precisely north-south; it is tilted towards Canada in the northern hemisphere, so the auroral oval reaches to lower latitudes in North America than on the other side of the planet. The vast majority of land situated in the auroral zone belongs to Canada.

Map of the Arctic showing the auroral zone. The ovals are lines of latitude. Canada has the bulk of the land in the auroral zone. Geographic pole 65º Geomagnetic pole 70º 75º