On the fictitious nonlinearity of the surface impedance of the Earth’s crust

The observations of Alfvén oscillations of the magnetosphere are used to study the Earth’s crust and upper mantle by the magnetotelluric sounding method. The sounding procedure involves the measurement of the horizontal components of the electromagnetic field at a given point on the ground, the calculation of the surface impedance, and the determination of the conductivity of rocks from these data. It has been shown that the anharmonicity of the oscillations of the magnetosphere in combination with the nonlocality of the boundary condition on the ground gives rise to the amplitude dependence of the impedance calculated using the classical magnetotelluric sounding method. This apparent nonlinearity of the impedance can be manifested in the sounding of the Earth’s interior with intense electromagnetic pulsations, which appear when the Earth’s magnetosphere is embedded in the highspeed solar wind flow.