Collaborative Research: The Next Generation of U.S. Geospace Research Facilities at South Pole, McMurdo, and Palmer Stations in Antarctica

The near-Earth (Geospace) environment is mostly controlled by the geomagnetic field that protects life on the planet from natural phenomena of electromagnetic nature, such as major geomagnetic storms caused by solar flares and coronal mass ejections. It is increasingly clear that the Geospace environment’s physics and dynamics are crucial for the functioning of the planet within the solar system, and understanding the Sun’s influence on technological systems deployed on the ground and in space becomes more and more important.

Indeed, space weather impacts a wide range of technologies, including spacecraft operations and orbits, GPS/GNSS systems, HF radio communications, and power grids and pipelines. The Earth’s polar regions are specific areas where geomagnetic field lines are open and directly interact with the interplanetary magnetic field (that is extended magnetic fields of the Sun).

During strong geomagnetic disturbances, the geomagnetic “polar caps” mirror these disturbances in the ionospheric level (as “aurorae on a screen”) and may increase their size, sometimes dramatically. Monitoring the Earth polar regions, ionospheric currents that flow over these regions, and polar cap boundaries dynamics are critically important for space weather studies and forecasts.

Hemispherically simultaneous observations of Geospace phenomena are critical in understanding how the solar wind energy and momentum are transferred to the coupled magnetosphere-ionosphere system.

The holistic approach to the Geospace research in the Antarctic is to integrate clustered instrumentation at multiple manned and unmanned locations and have a simultaneous look at the solar wind interactions within the global Geospace system. This award will support studies of interrelated geospace phenomena observed at southern high latitudes through the coordinated and collaborative effort while deploying and maintaining geospace instrumentation at the U.S.

Antarctic stations South Pole, McMurdo, and Palmer. The suite of geospace instrumentation at these stations has a sustained track-record of robust operation and overwhelming support of the research community. These are ground-based fluxgate and search-coils magnetometers, ELF and VLF receivers, imaging and broadband riometers, sky-looking optical systems, GPS scintillation-rated and GNSS receivers, as well as several other instruments.

Measurements collected from these instruments will be synergistically combined for the studies of synoptic variabilities of the magnetospheric open-closed boundary and associated cusp structures, understanding natural low-frequency electromagnetic emissions and their relationship to the ionospheric and magnetospheric conditions. These topics are only a partial listing of the research effort that can be performed with the data obtained from the Antarctic geospace instruments, especially via the already established and planned collaborations with other geospace projects operating across Antarctica and at magnetically conjugate regions in the Arctic. The project will train and educate young scientists, graduate, and undergraduate students.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.