Mysterious anomalies in Earth's atmosphere and strongly interacting Dark Matter

Abstract

It has been recently argued in \cite{Bertolucci:2016xjm, Zioutas:2020ndf, Zioutas:2023ybw} that numerous enigmatic observations remain challenging to explain within the framework of conventional physics. These anomalies include unexpected correlations between temperature variations in the stratosphere, the total electron content of the Earth's atmosphere, and earthquake activity on one hand, and the positions of planets on the other. Decades of collected data provide statistically significant evidence for these observed correlations. The work in \cite{Bertolucci:2016xjm, Zioutas:2020ndf, Zioutas:2023ybw} suggests that these correlations arise from strongly interacting ``streaming invisible matter'' which gets gravitationally focused by the solar system bodies including the Earth's inner mass distribution. Here, we propose that some of these, as well as other anomalies, may be explained by rare yet energetic events involving the so-called axion quark nuggets (AQNs) impacting the Earth. In other words, we identify the ``streaming invisible matter'' conjectured in \cite{Bertolucci:2016xjm, Zioutas:2020ndf, Zioutas:2023ybw} with AQNs, offering a concrete microscopic mechanism to elucidate the observed correlations. It is important to note that the AQN model was originally developed to address the observed similarity between the dark matter and visible matter densities in the Universe \cite{Zhitnitsky:2002qa, Zhitnitsky:2021iwg}, i.e., $\Omega_{\rm DM} \sim \Omega_{\rm visible}$ and not explain the anomalies discussed here. Nonetheless, we support our proposal by demonstrating that the intensity and spectral characteristics of AQN-induced events are consistent with the aforementioned puzzling observations.