Aurora tourism was first flagged by Station 11-North on 2025-10-15 as a low-amplitude disturbance in the continental shelf zone, registering 0.4 CAU. The initial signal presented as a cluster of long-exposure aurora photographs circulating within specialist photography and travel-planning communities, consistent with early-phase aesthetic movements driven by a single environmental catalyst — in this case, the approach of Solar Cycle 25's projected maximum. The imagery exhibited a specific visual grammar: wide-angle compositions foregrounding human silhouettes or isolated structures against curtains of auroral light, colour-graded toward magenta and teal, and captioned with geolocation data from northern Scandinavia, Iceland, and increasingly from mid-latitude sites not historically associated with aurora visibility. By 2025-11-28 the phenomenon had cleared the continental shelf and entered the shallows at 1.9 CAU, prompting reclassification from passive observation to active tracking under ATD Series Directive 4.1 (Aesthetic Movements).
The current ebb rate is estimated at 0.22 CAU per week, consistent with aesthetic movements of comparable peak amplitude following mainstream incursion. If this rate holds, the phenomenon should clear the intertidal zone by approximately 2026-04-10 and reach ambient levels below 0.2 CAU by 2026-06-18. However, the solar maximum cycle introduces a variable not present in most aesthetic movement precedents. A secondary geomagnetic event of G3 intensity or above during the ebb phase carries a 34% probability of triggering a recursive micro-surge, which modelling suggests would produce a transient spike of 1.2 to 2.0 CAU lasting no more than nine days before resuming decay. Such a surge would not constitute a new incoming phase and should not be reclassified as such absent sustained readings above 2.5 CAU for three consecutive sampling intervals, per ATD Reclassification Standard 9.2.
Monitoring frequency may be reduced from twice-weekly to weekly sampling once readings fall below 1.5 CAU, projected for the week of 2026-03-17 under current decay assumptions. Full reduction to monthly passive observation is recommended upon confirmed ambient return. Station 11-North should retain the aurora tourism file in active archive for a minimum of eighteen months following ambient return, given the possibility that the next solar cycle's ascending phase — expected no earlier than 2030 — could reactivate the aesthetic template in modified form. Any such reactivation would be logged as a new phenomenon entry and tracked independently.