Skaftafell·Iceland·27.02.2014—72 minutes, in order
Scroll
Skaftafell, Iceland — the 27th of February, 2014. It began the way they all begin: a pale grey arch low over the glacier, the kind of thing you’d miss if a camera hadn’t already turned it green. For an hour it just sat there. Then, at 23:24, it broke.
What follows is one storm, in the order it happened — the long quiet, the three violent minutes, the slow letting-go — over one frozen valley, watched by almost nobody. Aurora photographs usually flatten a night into one “best” frame. This is the night left in sequence.
0122:40 — to the naked eye, a pale grey band. The sensor sees this.
For the first hour, nothing you could call an event — to the eye, a pale arch over the glacier, brightening by degrees. The camera disagrees. Hold the shutter open long enough and the grey turns green, and a pink the eye has no access to stands in pillars over the ridge. This is the growth phase: the magnetosphere behind the Earth stretching, storing energy, giving no sign of the size of what it’s holding.
You learn, on nights like this, to distrust the calm. A too-quiet arc is often just the inhale before the whole sky exhales at once.
A too-quiet arc is often just the inhale before the whole sky exhales at once.
The last quiet minutes are not, in truth, quiet. The band has left the horizon and folds on itself now, throwing rays — and high on its top edge, a first stain of red. Noticed, not yet understood.
23:22. Two minutes to go, though nobody knows that yet.
0223:22 — the sky clearing its throat.
II
Then it lets go.
23:24 · the breaka corona overhead
0323:24 — it breaks. Inside a minute, a corona — the core already red.
Then it lets go. This is onset — the stretched magnetic field snapping back toward Earth and dumping its stored energy into the upper air all at once. The single band splits into rays, the rays start to move, and within a minute the whole thing has lifted off the horizon and swung directly overhead, folding into a corona — the point where the curtains stop being a wall in front of you and become a ceiling above you, pouring down out of a single point in the sky. The point it pours from is red. Nobody has time, yet, to ask what that means.
For the two or three minutes an onset lasts, there is too much to look at. It moves faster than it should, brighter than seems reasonable, and it makes a kind of silence you can hear — the specific silence of a person who has stopped narrating and is just watching.
The point where the curtains stop being a wall in front of you and become a ceiling above you.
0423:26 — a ceiling, not a wall. The only other witness: a radio mast.
0523:27 — the rays whirl into a knot.
Then the green stops being the whole story. High over the valley — faint at first, then not faint at all — the red starts down.
0623:30 — the red, coming down.
III
A green floor, a red ceiling.
23:31 · 250 km upthe number was big
0723:31 — the top of the sky burns red; upper right, the Pleiades.
It had been arriving all along — a stain on the curtains at 23:22, the core of the corona two minutes later. By 23:31 it owns the top of the sky. Green is the common colour — oxygen at a hundred kilometres. Red is oxygen too, but two hundred and fifty kilometres up, so faint and so high that it only shows when a storm pushes that far. It’s the sky’s way of telling you the number was big. For a few minutes the valley has a green floor and a red ceiling.
It’s the sky’s way of telling you the number was big.
IV
The sky hands the valley back.
23:52 · the colour drainsthe eye’s world again
Recovery is undramatic and always too soon. The corona loosens, the rays go back to being a band, the band sinks toward the horizon, and the colour drains until the sky is the blue-grey of any cold night.
By 23:52 the mountain is back — the eye’s world again, not the camera’s — and you’re standing in an ordinary cold dark valley, wondering if you imagined the size of it. You didn’t. The camera has it, in order, exactly as it happened.
0823:52 — the last of it, gone to blue.
A long quiet, a sudden violence, and a red that most nights never comes.
Every strong aurora is a version of this hour: a long quiet, a sudden violence, a slow letting-go, and a red that most nights never comes. You can’t make it happen and you can’t hurry it. All you can do is be standing in the cold, camera pointed north, on the one night in a season when a pale grey arch over a glacier decides to show you what it was holding.
The night, in order
Photo gallery
9 frames · 72 minutes tap a frame to open
The Night It Broke · Words & photographs · Yiğit Yüksel · Skaftafell, 27 Feb 2014
