Every 100 years, we're thrown back 100 years just by the solar storms, we're told. Because there are dozens of types of similar catastrophes, it is clear that every 100 years, we're thrown back several millennia. ;-)Every 11 years the [Sun's] north pole and the south pole flip, releasing a burst of radiation. But, every 100 years or so, a monster Tsunami from the Sun emerges which could literally cause trillions in property damage. […]
It could paralyze the economy of the planet Earth. In 1859 we had a gigantic solar storm which knocked out telegraph wires back then, 150 years ago. If that had happened today it would knock out almost all our satellites, knock out power stations, there would be food riots around the country because refrigeration would stop, airplanes would probably crash without radar. […]
And again, this is a once in a century, once in two centuries storm…
We do have them and we have to worry about them. […]
We’d be thrown back 100 years.
It sounds scary, doesn't it? One year after the Earth collapses because of the end of the Mayan Calendar in 2012 and after another doomsday prescribed by Nostradamus, we will face yet another Armageddon. Fine. You may buy insurance from me. What is going on?
My friend Olda Klimánek has written some amusing details about the story.
First, some background
The Sun is changing over time. There are approximately 11-year-long cycles of solar activity. The number of sunspots - a sunspot is a little mottle on the Sun that you can see through a telescope - reaches the minimum every 11 years. We have just seen one of the "cleanest" minima in decades a year or two years ago. Almost no sunspots for many long months. But it's over: the Sun shows us some sunspot activity again.
Every 11 years, the Solar magnetic field changes the direction - from South to North, if you wish. Only the absolute value (squared) matters for the number of sunspots. However, because you have a cycle with the "antiperiod" of 11 years, it's not hard to see that the genuine cycle is approximately 22 years long. After 22 years, the magnetic field of the Sun returns to the original state, including the sign.
This periodicity is not perfect, of course: there are also slower cycles (and perhaps also slower aperiodic phenomena) that change the behavior of the Sun every few centuries.
Some Czech media wrote that 2013 will be exceptional because the 11-year and 22-year cycles will reach a point of orgasm at the same moment. This is, as Olda explains, a complete misunderstanding of the cycles. These two cycles are synchronized so in each cycle, they're always in harmony (or disharmony) to the same extent. ;-) Clearly, they wanted to explain the 22-year peak by something else but it is not clear what the something else was.
Usually around the sunspots, the Sun sometimes produces an eruption called solar flare. Lots of radiation and protons with energies up to dozens of MeVs - a third of the speed of light, but usually much less - are ejected. (It's a high speed but the protons at the LHC carry 3,500 GeV at this point so the speed is 99.9999% of the speed of light or so.) Ionosphere of the Earth and long-wave communication is affected when the solar flare reaches our planet. But that's it.
Events: 1859 and 2013
So how did the Michio Kaku apocalypse in 1859 look like?
People could see aurorae but they probably caused less trouble than Aurora in the 1917 Saint Petersburg, Russia. ;-) And some miners prepared a breakfast too early. That must have cost trillions of dollars. ;-) But the masterpiece of the story are the telegraphs that turned into perpetuum mobile devices. Clearly, the hungry robots, iPods, and Macs - once disconnected from the power grid - are going to stage an uprising in 2013, being driven directly by the energy from the solar flares. ;-)On September 1–2, 1859, the largest recorded geomagnetic storm occurred. Aurorae were seen around the world, most notably over the Caribbean; also noteworthy were those over the Rocky Mountains that were so bright that their glow awoke gold miners, who began preparing breakfast because they thought it was morning.
Telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed. Telegraph pylons threw sparks and telegraph paper spontaneously caught fire. Some telegraph systems appeared to continue to send and receive messages despite having been disconnected from their power supplies.
I don't claim that all the observations in 1859 were bogus. There surely had to be some telegraphs that failed. But there's a lot of superstition and mythology surrounding such events, too. I personally think that a similarly strong event has occurred several times after 1859 again and almost no one has noticed. (Update: I take this sentence back after some commenters have convinced me that ice core data show an unusually high trace of beryllium-10 from 1859 that may be the highest in 2000 years.)
Why 2013?
Well, it's simple. The Solar Cycle 24 is predicted to reach its maximum in May 2013. And this maximum has to be spectacular, some people said.
In reality, such a maximum occurs every 11 years and just very recently, we thought that the ongoing solar cycle would be one of the least active ones: the sunspot number at the maximum was predicted to be e.g. 90, the lowest peak in 1928, and many people used it to argue that the reduced activity will induce a substantial cooling on Earth. A low activity would also seem to imply a low intensity and frequency of the solar storms and flares.
Nevertheless, two months ago, "NASA" warned of the 2013 apocalypse:
Telegraph, Telegraph video, WUWT, Google NewsAt least the Telegraph presented it in this way. They may be particularly scared because the 1859 solar storm has crippled a few telegraphs, too (see the picture for a brand new 1859 telegraph) - and telegraphs may sound even more obsolete and vulnerable today. ;-)
(More seriously, I believe that the telegraphs and grids in 1859 were much more shaky and the current electronic devices are much more robust when it comes to their resilience to perturbations.)
You will see that the whole story comes from Richard Fisher, the head of the NASA Heliophysics Division, who promotes his specialized discipline a little bit. But even though he was clearly selected as the advocate of the catchiest scenarios, he's not really saying much - and he's not hiding that what he's suggesting are mostly fantasies.
So I don't really understand why they think that something unusual - at the centennial time scale - should occur in 2013. In fact, I am convinced that this statement is wrong. By the way, Olda K. analyzes some similar statements about related solar events. Around August 3rd, 2010, the media were also writing about a comparably devastating effect of the Sun on our planet that was imminent.
Of course, nothing has happened.
It may be cool to speculate about catastrophes - to imagine that some of the catastrophic movies become reality - but once we entertain ourselves, we should still try to hard to distinguish the reality from the fiction. The reality is that unlikely and infrequent heliophysical (and other) events are unlikely and infrequent which means that unless you have a good reason to expect that they will occur, they will probably not occur anytime soon.
And that's the memo.
Thanks for the provocation to write it up to: Jaynie B.
