Paper ideas
Brainstormed paper concepts for TerraPulse, kept casual on purpose. These are pitches, not commitments — read for vibe, not detail. Companion to dream-papers.md (the legendary tier) and paper-coverage-gaps.md (the queued list). When one of these gets promoted, it moves to one of those files with an issue number attached.
Created 2026-05-26. Mike asked for a broader, less academic-shaped set of ideas; this file holds them.
1. The UFO sightings vs real sky events paper
We have eighty thousand UFO reports from the National UFO Reporting Center going back to 1906. We also have meteor showers, fireballs (atmospheric airbursts that get tracked by NASA), satellite launches, lunar phases, Venus apparitions. So: do "UFO sightings" actually cluster around real unusual sky events, or do they cluster around population density and the news cycle (Sputnik in 1957, drones in the 2010s)? Either answer is fun.
2. Earthquake lights
There's an old folklore claim that earthquakes produce flashes in the sky. We have 175,000 earthquakes since 2021 and the eighty thousand UFO sightings. Do UFO reports cluster in space and time around earthquake epicenters? Real result either way — confirmation would actually be news; null debunks a folk claim.
3. Earth's magnetic north pole is sprinting toward Russia
The pole moved leisurely for hundreds of years, then started accelerating in the 1990s, and is now moving at over thirty miles a year. We have pole positions going back to 1589 — four hundred and thirty-five years of data on a planetary phenomenon's acceleration. When does it cross the longitude of Moscow? What does the curve look like extrapolated? "Earth's compass is sprinting" is a great hook.
4. How overdue is the next Carrington-class solar storm?
In 1859 there was a solar storm so big telegraph wires sparked and aurora was visible at the equator. We have sunspot records back to 1818. Build the extreme-event tail of the distribution, give a real probability number for "next one in N years." This is actually a legitimate scientific question with operational implications (satellite operators care).
5. The volcanoes-vs-humans CO2 paper
Common climate-denial talking point: "volcanoes emit more carbon dioxide than humans." We have daily atmospheric carbon dioxide records since the 1950s and a five-thousand-entry volcanic eruption catalog. Measure the post-eruption carbon dioxide signature for the biggest eruptions we have on record, scale it, compare to global human emissions. Put an actual number on it.
6. Are gravitational waves coupled to anything on Earth?
We have 368 LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA gravitational wave detections — collisions of black holes and neutron stars from billions of light-years away. The physics says they cannot possibly affect Earth in any measurable way. So: do they statistically coincide with anything in our data (earthquakes, radiation, anything)? A clean null is itself a statement about cosmic scale — "this thing that happens billions of light-years away leaves no signal in any of the seventeen million Earth measurements we made nearby."
7. The fireball atlas
Five hundred and forty-one atmospheric airbursts (bright fireballs that exploded in the upper atmosphere) tracked by NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies since 1998. Each one has a location, an energy, and an altitude. Where do bolides preferentially go boom? Is the distribution uniform once you correct for ocean-observation gaps? The map alone is striking — most people have no idea how often city-sized rocks explode over the planet.
8. Was 2024 weird?
Combine all our data into a per-year "weirdness score" — for each parameter, how far each year deviated from its baseline. Rank the years. Did 2024 actually have anomalous earthquakes, weather, solar activity, fireballs, all at once — or did we just feel that way? This is the most direct site-traffic play; everyone wants to know if their year was actually unusual.
9. Ham radio operators as a global solar-storm detector network
Amateur radio operators bounce signals off the ionosphere; when a solar storm hits, the ionosphere changes and the signals get weird. We have years of WSPR (Weak Signal Propagation Reporter) data — a worldwide hobbyist measurement network. Can amateurs detect incoming solar storms before NOAA's official alerts? Citizen science meets space weather.
10. The aurora-at-your-latitude atlas
During severe geomagnetic storms, the aurora gets visible at lower and lower latitudes. We have decades of storm strength records. Build a global map: if you live at this latitude, how many nights a year would you have seen aurora over the last solar cycle? Then layer population density on top — how many humans got to see aurora last year? Visual and shareable.
11. The "is the solar cycle making things weirder" omnibus
We have many datasets that span the eleven-year solar cycle. Cosmic rays, geomagnetic storms, ionosphere conditions, and other people claim weather, lightning, even earthquakes. Build one paper that catalogs every effect we can measure, ranked by effect size. Some are real, some are bogus, some are uncertain. Settles a lot of internet arguments.
12. Tide gauges as quiet tsunami detectors
Two hundred and forty-seven thousand water-level records from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration tide gauges. Every magnitude-seven-and-up undersea earthquake should leave a tiny but detectable ripple in tide gauges thousands of miles away. Can we automate detection of these "ghost tsunamis" that nobody felt but the instruments did?