The DOI matches its Crossref record.
The Global Electric Circuit
Abstract
On a clear day, there is a downward electric field of 100 to 300 volts/meter at Earth's surface, although this field is not noticeable in daily life. That is, one does not encounter a 1 kV potential difference when getting into a car on an upper floor in a parking garage, and electrocution is not the major hazard associated with jumping out of trees. The major reason why we don't notice the fair-weather field is that virtually everything is a good conductor compared to air. Objects such as tree trunks and our bodies are excellent ionic conductors that short out the field and keep us from noticing it. But the field is there.
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Citations
Cited by
Mechanically-Induced Chemical Changes in Polymeric Materials
Caruso, M. M., Davis, D. A., Shen, Q., Odom, S. A., Sottos, N. R., White, S. R., & Moore, J. S. (2009) · Chemical Reviews · doi:10.1021/cr9001353 · Cited by 1,372
Thermodynamic Foundations of the Earth System
Kleidon, A. (2016) · doi:10.1017/cbo9781139342742 · Cited by 133
Metadata
- Authors
- Bering III, E. A., Few, A. A., & Benbrook, J. R.
- Venue
- Physics Today
- Publisher
- AIP Publishing
- Published
- 1998-10-01
- Volume
- 51
- Issue
- 10
- Pages
- 24-30
- ISSN
- 0031-9228 (ISSN-L)
- 1945-0699
- OpenAlex
- W2006518762
- Cited by
- 168
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 6.32
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
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How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The Global Electric Circuit. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1063/1.882422
- The paper
- Bering III, E. A., Few, A. A., & Benbrook, J. R. (1998). The Global Electric Circuit. Physics Today. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.882422
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
