TNB Night Owl – Step Aside, SMOD, You’ve Had Your Chance

On August 31, 2012 a long filament of solar material that had been hovering in the sun's atmosphere, the corona, erupted out into space at 4:36 p.m. EDT. The coronal mass ejection, or CME, traveled at over 900 miles per second. The CME did not travel directly toward Earth, but did connect with Earth's magnetic environment, or magnetosphere, causing aurora to appear on the night of Monday, September 3. Pictured here is a lighten blended version of the 304 and 171 angstrom wavelengths taken from the Solar Dynamics Observatory. Cropped. Photo by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

We’re all tired of waiting for you to do your thing, Sweet Meteor Of Death, so step aside. There’s a new threat vector promising to bring down the World As We Know It, and the odds look better with this new guy in town. Well, okay, technically he’s not really new, but the odds of getting hit really hard with a blind-side right hook out of nowhere have increased dramatically with the discovery of new data.

Scientist studying ice cores taken from deep below the surface of Antarctica and Greenland have found a huge spike in radioactive isotopes of the type known as cosmogenic radionuclides. These isotopes are created when high-energy solar particles collide with atoms in Earth’s atmosphere. High levels of cosmogenic radionuclides cause a spike in the ice core record indicating a massive solar storm (a coronal mass ejection from the Sun’s surface) took place at that point in time. The deeper the ice core sample, the farther back in time it occurred.

The data from Greenland and Antarctica ice cores show that approximately 9,200 years ago, one of the largest and most powerful coronal mass ejections (CMEs) ever discovered took place, scoring a direct hit on Earth. By itself, this is not a big deal – CMEs happen with regularity. Up until now, it was believed that CMEs were emitted from the Sun primarily during solar maximum: once every 11 years. The CME that occurred 9,200 years ago took place during a solar minimum.

This is a shocking revelation. Our technological infrastructure, including satellites, electric grids, and the Internet, are all highly vulnerable to CMEs, and now we learn that they can occur at any time, not just at solar maximum. We used to think we were safe most of the time from this kind of destruction, only needing to worry about it during the solar maximum of the eleven year solar cycle. Well, thanks a lot, SMOD. you had your chance.

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About Richard Doud 622 Articles
Learning is a life-long endeavor. Never stop learning. No one is right all the time. No one is wrong all the time. No exceptions to these rules.