The strong heartbeat of a living being is a sign of life and good health and it turns out that the beautiful Earth we call home also has a heartbeat. In actuality the Earth pulses with a kind of resonant wave also known as the Schumann Resonance.

Like other heartbeats, it is regulated by electricity and pulses at eight cycles per second. When lightening strikes the Earth, it creates electromagnetic waves in the Earth's atmosphere. There is no shortage of lightening strikes either as they occur over four million times a day. Most of the waves are are caught between the ground and the upper atmosphere, sixty miles up and most shake themselves to nothing. However other waves, with just the right wavelength and frequency keep going.

The wavelength is the circumference of the earth or more. The waves don't just sweep across the Earth but rather they are like standing waves that pulse at their lows and their crests, therefore a creating a resonant wave. The interesting thing is that scientists had always thought the heartbeat was confined to the earth and was trapped under the blanket of the ionosphere.

Recently however, scientists have discovered that is not the case. In a paper in the online journal Geophysical Research Letters, NASA scientists working on the Goddard Space Flight Center recently wrote that they have detected these waves up to five hundred miles from the Earth. It seems the Earth's heartbeat can be felt into space as these electromagnetic waves are leaking through the boundaries of earth and resonating upward and beyond.






Satellite observations of Schumann resonances in the Earth's ionosphere