If you think 2020 can’t get any worse, Dr. Tony Phillips notes a recent study that indicates that a Solar Minimum, which the Sun is enmeshed in currently, doesn’t mean the Sun can’t experience a monstrous case of the hiccups:
“In late October 1903, one of the strongest solar storms in modern history hit Earth,” say the lead authors of the study, Hisashi Hayakawa (Osaka University, Japan) and Paulo Ribeiro (Coimbra University, Portugal). “The timing of the storm interestingly parallels where we are now–near Solar Minimum just after a weak solar cycle.”
The 1903 event wasn’t always recognized as a great storm. Hayakawa and colleagues took an interest in it because of what happened when the storm hit. In magnetic observatories around the world, pens scrabbling across paper chart recorders literally flew offscale, overwhelmed by the disturbance. That’s the kind of thing superstorms do.
So, the researchers began to scour historical records for clues, and they found four magnetic observatories in Portugal, India, Mexico and China where the readings were whole. Using those data they calculated the size of the storm.“It was big,” says Hayakawa. “The 1903 storm ranks 6th in the list of known geomagnetic storms since 1850, just below the extreme storm of March 1989, which blacked out the province of Quebec.”
Today’s solar face, from which sunspots are virtually absent. A red herring, I presume.
Communications were scrambled – in 1903, meaning telegraph operators were unable to easily communicate with each other. Telephones became unworkable: In Chicago, voltages in telephone lines spiked to 675 volts–“enough to kill a man” according to headlines in the Chicago Sunday Tribune. That was annoying and maybe disturbing back then. Today? We might experience country-wide electrical grid failures, satellites providing critical services might be irremediably damaged, during the worst of it, the Internet might disappear – and provide a reason to dismiss Elon Musk’s irritating, to astronomers, scheme to use satellites for the Internet.
Perhaps Phillips is a bit of a drama queen, but the changes of this sort of thing happening are non-zero. Just as were Trump’s chances of becoming President – barely non-zero.
