Natural ELF fields in the atmosphere and in living organisms.

Author: Price C1, Williams E2, Elhalel G3, Sentman D4
Affiliation: <sup>1</sup>Deparment of Geophysics, Porter School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel. cprice@flash.tau.ac.il. <sup>2</sup>Parsons Lab, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA. <sup>3</sup>Deparment of Geophysics, Porter School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel. <sup>4</sup>Department of Geophysics, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, AK, USA.
Conference/Journal: Int J Biometeorol.
Date published: 2020 Feb 8
Other: Special Notes: doi: 10.1007/s00484-020-01864-6. [Epub ahead of print] , Word Count: 128


Most electrical activity in vertebrates and invertebrates occurs at extremely low frequencies (ELF), with characteristic maxima below 50 Hz. The origin of these frequency maxima is unknown and remains a mystery. We propose that over billions of years during the evolutionary history of living organisms on Earth, the natural electromagnetic resonant frequencies in the atmosphere, continuously generated by global lightning activity, provided the background electric fields for the development of cellular electrical activity. In some animals, the electrical spectrum is difficult to differentiate from the natural background atmospheric electric field produced by lightning. In this paper, we present evidence for the link between the natural ELF fields and those found in many living organisms, including humans.

KEYWORDS: Biological organisms; ELF; Lightning; Schumann resonances

PMID: 32034466 DOI: 10.1007/s00484-020-01864-6