Stressing of the magnetosphere by earthquakes Original Research Article

The purpose of this work is to focus attention on the Alfven wave structures that appear in magnetosphere in response to the Earth seismic activity. The hypothetical chain of events responsible for these structures generation is following: earthquake shock → infrasonic “boom” in neutral atmosphere → propagating of upward acoustic waves → dynamo-currents in the ionosphere E layer → emission of the Alfven waves into the magnetosphere. Computations show that seismogenic Alfven waves have slight magnitude (about 0.01 nT, in special cases up to ∼ 1 nT) and specific temporal-spatial structure. The knowledge about this structure will help to separate the seismogenic Alfven waves from non-seismic ones.