![]() Image credit: John Megahan, University of Michigan, from Space weather from the sun, such as coronal mass ejections, disturb Earth’s magnetic field, causing the auroras and potentially decreasing the magnetic field’s reliability for migrating birds. Conceptual and geographic layout of the study system. “Our findings highlight how animal decisions are dependent on environmental conditions-including those that we as humans cannot perceive, such as geomagnetic disturbances-and that these behaviors influence population-level patterns of animal movement,” said study lead author Eric Gulson-Castillo, a doctoral student in the U-M Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. 9 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provide correlational evidence for previously unknown relationships between nocturnal bird migration dynamics and geomagnetic disturbances, according to the researchers. Study: Space weather disrupts nocturnal bird migration, DOI 10.1073/pnas.2306317120 And the birds that chose to migrate during such events seemed to experience more difficulty navigating, especially under overcast conditions in autumn. They found a 9%-17% reduction in the number of migrating birds, in both spring and fall, during severe space weather events. Doppler weather radar stations and ground-based magnetometers-devices that measure the intensity of local magnetic fields-to test for a possible link between geomagnetic disturbances and disruptions to nocturnal bird migration. University of Michigan researchers and their colleagues used massive, long-term datasets from networks of U.S. ![]() But how do periodic disruptions of the planet’s magnetic field, caused by solar flares and other energetic outbursts, affect the reliability of those biological navigation systems?
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