Ancient Tree Rings Reveal ‘Unimaginable’ Two-Year Solar Storms That Could Destroy Global Infrastructure

What is a “Miyake Event?” It’s an important question because if one happened today the effect on global infrastructure would be “unimaginable,” according to the authors of new research into tree rings.

Worse, there’s a 1% chance it could happen in the next decade, destroying technology including satellites, internet cables, long-distance power lines and transformers, they said.

A “Miyake Event” refers to something sinister coming from to Earth from the Sun—and we know how often they occur because they leave an imprint in tree rings. Since it’s possible to count a tree’s rings to identify its age it’s also possible to see historical cosmic events going back thousands of years.

A “Miyake Event” is specifically when tree rings reveal a level of an isotope called carbon-14 about 20 times as higher than normal.

“Huge bursts of cosmic radiation, known as Miyake Events, have occurred approximately once every thousand years, but what causes them is unclear,” said research team leader Dr. Benjamin Pope from the University of Queensland’s School of Mathematics and Physics. “The effect on global infrastructure would be unimaginable.”

The new paper published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical Physical and Engineering Sciences.

Pope led a team that developed software to analyse every available piece of data on the rings of millennia-old trees. “When radiation strikes the atmosphere it produces radioactive carbon-14, which filters through the air, oceans, plants, and animals, and produces an annual record of radiation in tree rings,” said first author Qingyuan Zhang, an undergraduate maths student who developed the software.

They then modelled the global carbon cycle to reconstruct the process over a 10,000-year period to see scale and nature of these “Miyake Events.”

It was suspected that such events could be caused by solar flares, which send a surge of charged particles into space. We know the Sun has a sunspot cycle of roughly 11 years long during which it waxes to “solar maximum” (indicated by lots of sunspots on its surface and during which solar flares are more common) and wanes to “solar minimum.” Solar maximum is due in late 2024.

However, “Miyake Events” could be more sinister. “We’ve shown they’re not correlated with sunspot activity, and some actually last one or two years,” said Pope. So rather than a single instantaneous explosion or flare such events may be the result of a more prolonged storm or outburst.”

This is disturbing, said Pope. “Based on available data, there’s roughly a one per cent chance of seeing another one within the next decade … but we don’t know how to predict it or what harms it may cause.”

Is the internet safe? Apparently not.

Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.

You may also like...