Science: Kennelly-Heaviside Bulge

To explain radio, among other natural phenomena, physicists have imagined a stretchy blanket of ions encasing the Earth. This is the Kennelly-Heaviside Layer, named after Harvard’s Bombay-born Professor Arthur Edwin Kennelly and England’s late (1850-1925) Oliver Heaviside, bookstore keeper who for amusement invented mathematical forms to describe the behavior of alternating currents. Radio waves are presumed to reflect from the Layer much as light beams reflect from a mirror. Estimates place the Layer at 50 to 250 mi. from Earth’s surface and picture it as roughly spherical.* At night the Layer shrinks comparatively close to Earth; by day, as the Sun puts in its effect, it recedes. But this theory of diurnal, tide-like pulsation has not explained all radio reactions against the Kennelly-Heaviside Layer. A Navy physicist Polar-yearing at Fairbanks, Alaska, last week offered a new explanation.

Dr. Harry B. Maris, observing radio signals one day, noticed that they came with an unaccountable time lag. He could explain the lag by supposing that the radio waves were reflected from a layer of ions 1,300 mi. high. If his supposition was valid, the Kennelly-Heaviside Layer was not a pulsating spheroid, but a spheroid with one axis pushed out to make a shape much like that of a standard X-ray tube, with Earth & its inhabitants at the centre. The distances from the Earth’s magnetic poles to the ends of the ‘”tube” would be about 1,300 mi.; distance from the Earth’s magnetic equator to the spherical walls of the “tube” would be the orthodox Kennelly-Heaviside 50-250 mi.

Such spindling of the Kennelly-Heaviside Layer requires a logical mechanics. Dr. Maris, “elated over the discovery,” described a mechanics to burly, booming old Captain Robert Abram (“Bob”) Bartlett, who while visiting Alaska is acting correspondent for the New York Times. Dr. Maris expounded: “The earth in its motion through space occasionally passes through streams of gas, debris of comets, etc. It is entirely within the realms of possibility that friction between the atmosphere of the earth and these very rare gas clouds should leave the earth with a positive charge. . . .

“If the earth were to receive a positive charge, the positive ions would immediately start to move away from it in all directions. Those near the Equator would be caught in the earth’s magnetic field at a height varying from two to four hundred kilometers, but near the poles they would be free to move out until equilibrium had been established.

“It would seem reasonable to assume that when the measurements recorded were being made, equilibrium had been established between electrostatic forces and those of gravity at a height of 1,300 miles.”

*Among other supernal levels is one at 800,000 miles, discovered in 1928 by Norway’s Carl Mulertz Stormer. Here begin to form Polar auroras from solar electrons projected 92 million miles.