Expert: Steve Nelson - 4/23/2010

Question
Dear Steve
Many thanks for attempting my last question, I can well appreciate that you may have struggled answering this, as I do struggle writing this. (My writing skills are awful). If I may try to clarify my writing.
The fact that the object was cross shaped is interesting but secondary as the whole object was fascinating. You mentioned that these beams might have been due to the clouds and water droplets that i mentioned, but you seem to have mixed up my sightings. The clouds i mentioned were seen around the green object, while the red sphere with the beams was seen just above the ground on a night that i don’t recall being anything but dry. It was clear that these beams were not glare or like the spikes you might see around a star through a telescope, for example. The beams were very defined and they were of an even thicknesses from top to bottom, like laser beams. I’m confident that these beams were what experts may refer to as jets. In my research I found this article, which I think shows that science maybe close to reproducing these jets. Quote: "The luminous balls seem to be alive," says Pavão. He says their fuzzy surfaces emitted little jets that seemed to jerk them forward or sideways).See:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19325863.500-lightning-balls-created-in-th...
So! My questions are, In your opinion:
1.   Can the earth’s magnetic field produce plasmas?

Professor Gort mentioned something called telluric currents. Does this make sense to you? http://en.allexperts.com/q/Astronomy-1360/earth-flares.htm

Many thanks
David

Answer
The Earth's magnetic field, even during a geomagnetic storm, isn't strongly fluctuating enough to produce plasmas.  It can redirect incoming ions from space (auroras, which are often very faint), causing a diffuse plasma in the upper atmosphere, which can be seen very far south on occasion and are often green in color.  It's possible that the self-field of a really intense and short-range intercloud lightning bolt (that would have had to cause a really localized plasma pinch instability) could have created a green plasma ball by very strong ionization of nitrogen (see figure 2a here http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0469(1984)041%3C3180:ASIMOL%3E2.0.CO;2 , the biggest output is in the green wavelengths). There's also upper-atmospheric lightning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper-atmospheric_lightning which is fascinating, but usually red and blue, but poorly understood and not definitively photographed until 1989.  Pilots saw it, and meteorologists discounted their descriptions, and now meteorologists are trying to explain the phenomena.

Basically, we can all think up scenarios where intense charging and discharging could create plasmas with all sorts of random appearance and color.  The problem is that, without instrumentation to measure field configurations or at least a color photo of the possible plasma-related objects you saw to analyze, all the experts in the world won't be able to give you a definitive answer.  If you can sketch and scan a picture of what you saw, it might be helpful for the red object.  I think in one of the stages of submission of questions it gives you the option to attach an image.