Monitoring of the Antarctic geomagnetic field and VLF variations for trends

Through various solar wind-magnetosphere interactions, about one million megawatts of energy enters the magnetosphere to drive electrical currents, energize plasma, and produce complex and variable patterns of plasma convection. Since the ionosphere and magnetosphere are electrically coupled by the anisotropic behaviour of the plasma in the magnetospheric field, ground magnetic observations of ionospheric phenomena made at high latitudes have become a focus for a variety of investigations.

On Earth's surface, the 'electromagnetic weather' which results as energy and momentum are transferred between the solar wind, magnetosphere, and ionosphere can be monitored using ground magnetometers. In a joint effort, IZMIRAN (Moscow, Russia, izmiran.rssi.ru/ ) and the Australian Antarctic Division (with the follow-on collaboration with the University of Michigan, mist.nianet.org/ ) deployed the digital quartz magnetometer and VLF data logging system at Davis in 1992 in the framework of the project 'Studies of the Southern polar cap boundary from magnetometer and very-low-frequency observations in Antarctica', sponsored by the Australian Antarctic Foundation.