Earth is leaking gas into space!

The WaPo reports (not paywalled) that a previously undetected electrical field is causing loss of about 90 tons/day of gas into space:
Scientists just discovered why Earth’s atmosphere is leaking

It turns out the mysterious force is a previously undiscovered global electric field.

First came the surprising discovery that Earth’s atmosphere is leaking. But for roughly 60 years, the reason remained a mystery.

Since the late 1960s, satellites over the poles detected an extremely fast flow of particles escaping into space — at speeds of 20 kilometers per second.

Mathematically, scientists have long theorized that a small electric field could provide enough energy to shuttle hydrogen out of our atmosphere. But it would probably be generated on a subatomic scale and be incredibly weak.

“It was just thought impossible to measure. It’s so weak,” said Collinson. In fact, Collinson and his colleagues had to invent an instrument, a photoelectron spectrometer, to measure the weak field.

Traveling by boat for 17 hours, the team headed to a place called Svalbard and launched a small rocket — named Endurance, after the famous Antarctic vessel in the 1910s — to fly briefly into space and collect real-time data with the new instrument. Svalbard, an archipelago between Norway and the North Pole, was an ideal location because rocket scientists can directly launch into the polar wind.

The rocket’s spectrometer recorded a small change of 0.55 volts from the Earth's surface to 477 miles high. Half a volt sounds small but can launch a light atom to space. For a hydrogen atom, the upward pull of this electric field is 10.6 times stronger than gravity pulling downward, said Alex Glocer, a NASA physicist and co-author of the study.
The animation shows hot, lightweight electrons shackled to much heavier ions through the ambipolar electric field. These ions feel the force of gravity over a thousand times more than the tiny electrons and try to pull the electrons back toward Earth. But the electrons have so much energy, they continue traveling up.

 

By Germaine: Resisting getting sucked into space using a secret layer of non-ionized lard

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