What are the x- and c- shaped structures scientists have spotted in the atmosphere?

NASA scientists are working to explain the presence of structures that have been described as having a C and X shape in the Earth’s atmosphere. These structures, which NASA falls crests and bubbles, had been previously seen, but only in their X formation.

These structures had been noticed by scientists after a major solar storm or volcanic erruption. In late June, NASA announced that the discovery had been witnessed in the ionosphere, one of the lower levels of the atmosphere, covering the area between 50 and 400 miles above the earth’s crust.

“The ionosphere,” explains NASA, “becomes electrically charged during the daytime when sunlight strikes our planet, and its energy knocks electrons off atoms and molecules.” The benefit for humans is that this process “creates a soup of charged particles, known as plasma, that allows radio signals to travel over long distances.”

All that remains to be discovered

As previously mentioned, the X crests have been seen by NASA in the ionosphere before, the difference being that during the agency’s Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD) mission, they found them when no major disturbance had occurred. Additionally, the GOLD mission also found small C-shaped (and inverse C-shaped) structures within this part of the atmosphere.

The direction of the C is hypothesized to relate to the winds in the area. When the bind blows strong and long enough in a certain direction, the plasma bubbles will begin to take that shape. What surprised NASA’s scientists was that different shaped bubbles were spotted within close proximity of one another. “Within that close proximity, these two opposite-shaped plasma bubbles had never been thought of, never been imaged,” explained Deepak Karan, who works for the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.