Schumann Resonance Blackout
When the Schumann Chart
Goes Dark
A Schumann Resonance blackout means the monitoring station stopped publishing its chart, not that Earth's resonance stopped: lightning keeps exciting it about 44 times a second, and other stations keep recording it.
Is the Schumann Resonance offline right now?
Yes, the Tomsk station is offline. It has not published a chart since 2 November 2026 at 01:00 UTC.
ResonanceOne switched automatically to the Etna Radio Observatory in Sicily, so the live reading continues. Reload the page for the latest status. The rest of the page explains what a blackout is when the chart goes dark.
© ERO, Etna Radio Observatory, Nicolosi, Sicily · etna-ero.itOne station
Why does the Schumann chart
go offline?
The charts almost everyone shares come from one station, one antenna and one website: Tomsk State University's Space Observing System in Siberia, Russia.
Every app and site that shows "the Schumann chart" is copying that same image. When the server stops, they all go dark at the same moment. That is why the gap looks global.
ResonanceOne is not affiliated with Tomsk State University. sosrff.tsu.ru
Ordinary causes
Server or website maintenance, a network problem, a power or instrument fault, or a change in how the data is shared.
Outages have historically been maintenance, network or server problems. Tomsk once suspended chart updates while changing its data-access policy, as reported by schumann-resonance.earth.
The cause of the November 2026 outage has not been announced.
The resonance
Did the Schumann Resonance
actually stop?
No. About 44 lightning flashes every second keep the cavity ringing. Christian et al., 2003 measured 44 plus or minus 5 flashes per second. The resonance would stop only if every thunderstorm on Earth stopped at once.
Schumann resonances (extremely low frequency, 3 to 60 Hz) sit near 7.83, 14.3, 20.8, 27.3 and 33.8 Hz because of Earth's size and the height of the ionosphere. They wobble by fractions of a hertz. They do not rise, and "high" means amplitude, which is signal power, never a change in the 7.83 Hz frequency. Price, 2016 and Sátori, 1996.
Stations on other continents keep their own records. Nagycenk in Hungary has recorded since 1993. Hornsund and Belsk in Poland, the Sierra Nevada station in Spain, and Modra in Slovakia do too. This page does not claim any of them is publishing a live public chart today.
During this outage our backup station has kept the resonance bands in view for 137 hourly readings, starting 2 November 2026 at 02:00 UTC. The backup station is the Etna Radio Observatory (ERO) in Nicolosi, Sicily.
© ERO, Etna Radio Observatory, Nicolosi, Sicily · etna-ero.itWhat you see
Blackout, whiteout or black lines:
what am I looking at?
A blackout, a whiteout and a black bar are three different pictures. Only the narrow bright bands are the resonance itself.
| What you see | What it means | Usual cause | Global event? | What ResonanceOne does |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chart not updating, or the site is down | Station or website outage | Server, network, maintenance | No | Switches to the Etna backup and labels it |
| Black vertical bar inside a chart | Hours with no recorded data | Instrument or transfer gap | No | Leaves the gap visible. It does not fill the hour. |
| Full-height white column (whiteout) | Too much signal, saturation | A thunderstorm or snowstorm over the station | No | Holds the last clean reading. Thunderstorm interference |
| Brighter narrow bands at 7.83, 14 and 20 Hz | Real change in resonance amplitude | Global lightning or ionosphere activity | Yes, this is the real signal | Measured in the Activity Index |
A storm over the antenna correlates with what an ELF detector records, which is why a whiteout is local weather (Tatsis et al., 2021). The backup in the first row is the Etna Radio Observatory.
© ERO, Etna Radio Observatory, Nicolosi, Sicily · etna-ero.itThe captions
Is a Schumann blackout
a timeline jump?
No. The gap is a chart file that stopped arriving, not a record of a timeline jump or a timeline shift.
Some intuitive creators read the break in the chart, once the image returns, as a collective timeline jump or shift. The words are theirs. Noticing that the chart broke is a fair instinct. It is aimed at a missing upload.
The data cannot show one. The gap is identical on every site because they all mirror one server, and it begins when that website stops responding. Other stations show no matching gap. Lightning still excites the cavity, and the mode frequencies have no mechanism for a jump.
Earlier Tomsk outages were read the same way, and the chart came back each time. The outage log below lists every one in our record.
If you feel off while the chart is dark, that still deserves care. What tends to help is slow breathing, time outside, and a regular sleep schedule. ResonanceOne includes more than 40 guided practices for exactly that, in the app. A missing chart is not a medical signal. If something feels wrong in a way that worries you, a clinician is the right person to ask.
Often called
Earth went silent
Lightning kept flashing. The global average is about 44 flashes a second, and that lightning is what excites the resonance.
Often called
Black means energy too intense to measure
Too much signal is a white column, a whiteout. A black bar is the opposite: an hour with no recorded data.
Often called
The data is being suppressed
The gap is identical on every site because they copy one server. It starts when that server stops responding. Other stations do not show the same gap.
Often called
Caused by a solar flare, HAARP or CERN
A flare or a geomagnetic storm changes amplitude in the resonance bands. It does not decide whether a website publishes. The outage log shows gaps like this are routine.
Often called
The first blackout in history
Our record starts on 13 November 2025, and it already shows repeated outages. The table below lists them. We do not have a record before that date.
Our record
How often does the Tomsk station
go offline?
12 outages of 2 hours or more since our record began on 13 November 2025. All 11 finished outages lasted under 40 hours. The longest is the one still running, at 137 hours. We do not have a record before that date.
Each row is a run of hours when our collector found no new usable Tomsk chart. Hours our own pipeline failed to write are absent, so this is Tomsk going silent. Runs shorter than 2 hours are not listed.
| Started (UTC) | Hours | Status |
|---|---|---|
| 2 November 2026 at 02:00 UTC | 137 | Ongoing |
| 26 September 2026 at 17:00 UTC | 12 | FinishedAlso reported by an independent site. |
| 4 August 2026 at 13:00 UTC | 6 | Finished |
| 6 June 2026 at 08:00 UTC | 3 | Finished |
| 4 June 2026 at 19:00 UTC | 12 | Finished |
| 25 April 2026 at 17:00 UTC | 37 | Finished |
| 11 April 2026 at 19:01 UTC | 5 | Finished |
| 21 March 2026 at 17:00 UTC | 20 | Finished |
| 13 January 2026 at 10:00 UTC | 2 | Finished |
| 10 January 2026 at 18:00 UTC | 15 | Finished |
| 18 December 2025 at 15:01 UTC | 3 | Finished |
| 16 December 2025 at 17:00 UTC | 21 | Finished |
While it is down
Where can I see Schumann data
while Tomsk is down?
Use a source that tells you which station you are looking at.
ResonanceOne
Switches to the backup automatically and labels it. The live reading and the app both do this.
Pick this if you want one number that keeps working.
Etna Radio Observatory
The raw induction-coil spectrograms from Nicolosi, Sicily. etna-ero.it
© ERO, Etna Radio Observatory, Nicolosi, Sicily · etna-ero.itPick this if you want the raw backup chart.
NOAA, for Kp and solar
The Space Weather Prediction Center kept publishing the Kp index and solar X-ray flux through the outage. That is space weather, not a Schumann chart.
Other ELF stations exist. Most do not publish a live public chart, and this page does not claim one does.
Common questions
Questions people type
about a blackout
Sources
Scientific references
and the stations
Schumann, W.O. (1952). Über die strahlungslosen Eigenschwingungen einer leitenden Kugel, die von einer Luftschicht und einer Ionosphärenhülle umgeben ist. Zeitschrift für Naturforschung A, 7(2), 149-154.
The prediction of the resonances in the cavity between Earth's surface and the ionosphere.
Balser, M. & Wagner, C.A. (1960). Observations of Earth-ionosphere cavity resonances. Nature, 188, 638-641.
The first spectral observation of the resonance lines, with the fundamental near 8 Hz.
Christian, H.J. et al. (2003). Global frequency and distribution of lightning as observed from space by the Optical Transient Detector. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 108(D1), 4005.
44 plus or minus 5 flashes per second globally, about 55 in northern summer and 35 in northern winter.
Cecil, D.J., Buechler, D.E. & Blakeslee, R.J. (2014). Gridded lightning climatology from TRMM-LIS and OTD: Dataset description. Atmospheric Research, 135-136, 404-414.
The combined LIS and OTD record puts the global rate near 46 flashes per second.
Williams, E.R. (1992). The Schumann resonance: a global tropical thermometer. Science, 256(5060), 1184-1187.
Resonance amplitude tracks global lightning, which follows tropical temperature. Real changes show up as amplitude.
Price, C. (2016). ELF electromagnetic waves from lightning: the Schumann resonances. Atmosphere, 7(9), 116.
Open review: lightning is the source, the mode frequencies are set by the cavity, and natural variations are small.
Nickolaenko, A. & Hayakawa, M. (2002). Resonances in the Earth-Ionosphere Cavity. Kluwer Academic Publishers.
The standard textbook on the cavity. Lightning keeps it ringing, and the resonance does not switch off on its own.
Sátori, G. (1996). Monitoring Schumann resonances, II. Daily and seasonal frequency variations. Journal of Atmospheric and Terrestrial Physics, 58(13), 1483-1488.
Mode frequencies move by fractions of a hertz across the day and the season. They do not rise away from the cavity modes.
Rodríguez-Camacho, J. et al. (2022). Four year study of the Schumann resonance regular variations using the Sierra Nevada station ground-based magnetometers. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.
An independent station in the Sierra Nevada, Spain, keeps its own record, and the paper calls for a shared database across ELF stations.
EGU General Assembly (2023). Multi-station Schumann analysis, abstract EGU23-657. Hornsund, Belsk, Rovaniemi, Ivalo, Eskdalemuir, Nagycenk, Boulder Creek, Shillong.
A list of long-running independent ELF stations. Nagycenk in Hungary has recorded since 1993.
Ondrášková, A., Kostecký, P., Ševčík, S. & Rosenberg, L. (2007). Long-term observations of Schumann resonances at Modra Observatory. Radio Science, 42(2).
More than four years of continuous monitoring at Modra, Slovakia, another station independent of Tomsk.
NASA Scientific Visualization Studio (2012). Schumann resonance animation. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, SVS ID 10891.
An accessible account of the Earth-ionosphere cavity. The rate we cite is Christian et al. 2003, not the round number on this page.
Etna Radio Observatory (ERO) (2026). Live induction-coil spectrograms, Nicolosi, Sicily. etna-ero.it.
Our backup station while Tomsk is offline. Credit required wherever it is named: © ERO, Etna Radio Observatory, Nicolosi, Sicily · etna-ero.it.
Tomsk State University, Space Observing System (2026). Primary Schumann spectrograms, Tomsk, Siberia. sosrff.tsu.ru.
The station behind the chart most sites copy. The site was unreachable on 7 November 2026, so this page does not quote it. ResonanceOne is not affiliated with Tomsk State University.
NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center (2026). Planetary K index and GOES solar X-ray flux. swpc.noaa.gov.
Our Kp and solar source. Both stayed live during the November 2026 Tomsk outage.
Tatsis, G. et al. (2021). Correlation of local lightning activity with extra low frequency detector for Schumann Resonance measurements. Science of the Total Environment, 787, 147671.
Local strikes correlate with what an ELF detector records, which is why a storm over one station has to be removed before the reading is treated as global.
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