I’ve had a series of wonderful “nature moments” in the last week… I was awakened early Tuesday morning by a bugling bull elk outside my open window, expressing his rutting randiness with that eerie trumpeting sound. My goosebumps were not from the frosty mountain air…

Then I was watching a glacier (Cavell Glacier in Jasper National Park) on Tuesday when I happened to witness a massive chunk of ice calve off into the lake. Over the years, I have occasionally seen bits break off glaciers and make that impressive “gunshot” sound of ice cracking, but this was on a huge scale — really special. It’s hard to judge precisely from across the small lake, but I’d estimate it was a chunk maybe 50m wide and 15m high that broke off(!). After several internal groans and bangs, it dropped into the lake in “slow motion” with a giant splash that caused a minor tsunami…a wave that worked its way across the lake. By the time it reached our shore it was mostly a ripple, though, since the lake was almost frozen over and the wave lost a lot of its energy.

Last night, I flew from Edmonton to Montreal on the Air Canada red-eye flight. We left Edmonton at 1h15 and arrived in Montreal 4 hours later, just after sunrise, around 7h10. Somewhere in between (I suspect when we were over Saskatchewan) I suddenly jolted out of my semi-conscious reverie and looked out the window. I was greeted by two unlikely sights…first, a bright meteor shot vertically downwards just at the moment I looked out. Second, the view out my window was filled with green and very dynamic Northern Lights (aurora borealis) from horizon to horizon. What a treat! They continued for a long while, and so I didn’t sleep much after that, just kept staring out the window.

I tried to take a few pictures when they were at their most dramatic, to give you a vague idea what it was like… (note that the window was quite greasy in spite of my attempts to clean it, and also it’s hard to hold a camera steady for a second or two on a bumpy airplane!) Luckily aurorae are not “hard-edged” phenomena, so a little blur doesn’t hurt. Note that this is pretty far south for such an intense display — probably the plane was around 51 or 52 degrees North at the time.

When I got home, I checked SpaceWeather.com, and discovered the following:

High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras tonight. Earth is entering a high-speed solar wind stream, which could trigger a geomagnetic storm.

Indeed…