A friend and reader sends an article on just how deep the Sun can reach into the Earth and we hardly even notice, courtesy Scientific American:
“Between 2 and 4 August 1972 [a sunspot] produced a series of brilliant flares, energetic particle enhancements and Earth-directed ejecta,” [researchers] wrote. …
And somehow, amid all that drama, space weather researchers had largely ignored another consequence of the storm: “the sudden detonation of a ‘large number’ of US Navy… sea mines [that had been] dropped into the coastal waters of North Vietnam only three months earlier.”
We all know the telegraph stories from the 1859, where unpowered telegraphs suddenly sprang into activity, powered by an immense solar flare that hasn’t been matched since. But sometimes these flares can do odd, odd things to unstable mechanisms, of which I would classify sea mines.
I wonder if other munitions, such as those on wrecks, might also be vulnerable? There are a few wrecks that are under surveillance because of the dangers they pose if their cargoes were to detonate. Could the metallic hulls somehow destabilize these precarious munitions?
