  Large compressions of the magnetopause are proposed to occasionally result
from temporary encounters of the magnetosphere with dust streams in
interplanetary space. Such streams may have their origin in cometary dust tails
or asteroids which cross the inner heliosphere or in meteoroids in Earth's
vicinity. Dust ejected from such objects when embedding the magnetosphere for
their limited transition time should cause substantial global deformations of
the magnetopause/magnetosphere due to the very large dust grain mass and
momentum which compensates for the low dust density when contributing to the
upstream pressure variation.
