Posted on 09/02/2009 10:35:38 AM PDT by TaraP
On Sept. 2nd, a billion-ton coronal mass ejection (CME) slammed into Earth's magnetic field. Campers in the Rocky Mountains woke up in the middle of the night, thinking that the glow they saw was sunrise. No, it was the Northern Lights. People in Cuba read their morning paper by the red illumination of aurora borealis. Earth was peppered by particles so energetic, they altered the chemistry of polar ice.
Hard to believe? It really happened--exactly 150 years ago. This map shows where auroras were sighted in the early hours of Sept. 2, 1859
As the day unfolded, the gathering storm electrified telegraph lines, shocking technicians and setting their telegraph papers on fire. The "Victorian Internet" was knocked offline. Magnetometers around the world recorded strong disturbances in the planetary magnetic field for more than a week.
The cause of all this was an extraordinary solar flare witnessed the day before by British astronomer Richard Carrington. His sighting marked the discovery of solar flares and foreshadowed a new field of study: space weather. According to the National Academy of Sciences, if a similar flare occurred today, it would cause $1 to 2 trillion in damage to society's high-tech infrastructure and require four to ten years for complete recovery.
A repeat of the Carrington Event seems unlikely from our low vantage in a deep solar minimum--but don't let the quiet fool you. Strong flares can occur even during weak solar cycles. Indeed, the Carrington flare itself occured during a relatively weak cycle similar to the one expected to peak in 2012-2013. Could it happen again? Let's hope not.
Solar Climate Change, coming to provide the basis of massive tax increases from politicians near you.
“On Sept. 2nd, a billion-ton coronal mass ejection (CME) slammed into Earth’s magnetic field. “
I would suggest a pregnancy test...
We all die.
It was all Bush’s fault.
I remember very clearly seeing the Northern Lights one night in Northern New Jersey when I was a kid in the early seventies.
That movie won the “MOST DEPRESSING EVER!! ENDING” award for us!! What a letdown. Almost as bad as that global warming/THE POLLEN DID IT! movie by Shamalyn (sp?) awhile ago!
That would be The Happening. Worst 1 1/2 hour i’ve ever wasted. The basic premise: Earth would be better off if all humans just killed themselves.
The Sun is too dangerous. Blow it up!
I just saw that movie last week, yes, we all die, burned to a crisp.
But of course. What else can be next after taxing the air we breathe?
I hated the ending. I was with it for awhile, but the end made the movie terrible.
“Hard to believe? It really happened—exactly 150 years ago. This map shows where auroras were sighted in the early hours of Sept. 2, 1859”
“The cause of all this was an extraordinary solar flare witnessed the day before by British astronomer Richard Carrington. His sighting marked the discovery of solar flares and foreshadowed a new field of study: space weather.”
—
REALLY?? Such precision exactly 150 years ago. /sarcasm
http://www-istp.gsfc.nasa.gov/Education/whsun.html
Large sunspots may be occasionally seen by the unaided eye, with the sun near the horizon and dimmed by thick haze. Early observations of this sort exist, but not much was remembered of them, and when around 1610 they were seen more clearly with the help of the telescope, the discovery came as a great surprise.
Three observers claimed the discovery—Galileo, who risked blindness by looking at the Sun through a telescope, the priest Christopher Scheiner in Germany, who invented the safe observing method of projecting the Sun’s image onto a screen, and Johann Fabricius in Holland. After the initial studies, however, interest in sunspots declined, in part because (for reasons still not known) they almost disappeared between 1645 and 1715.
Heinrich Schwabe
The modern period of sunspot research began with Heinrich Schwabe, a pharmacist in the German town of Dessau who was also an amateur astronomer. Schwabe’s original interest was the possibility of an unknown planet close to the Sun, which he believed might be detected as a dark spot when passing in front of the Sun. Year after year, beginning in 1826, on every clear day, Schwabe would scan the sun and record its spots, until 17 years later he began to suspect a regular variation. He published his findings in a short article “Solar Observations during 1843” which at first attracted little attention. One of the few who noted and was impresed was Rudolf Wolf of Bern, Switzerland (later Zürich), who from 1847 began observing sunspots himself. In 1848 Wolf devised the “Zürich sunspot number” to gauge the number of sunspots (giving extra weight to groupings), which is still used (in the figure below as well).
Cage was so disappointing. I expected something similar to his movies about searching clues for treasure, but this was just awful.
That was always the concern.
It was finessed by taxing the air you exhale (~ 4% CO2).
As I saw the end (not the firey end), Humanity was given a chance to start over, in a new place, when children were transported to a beautiful garden, with a large and very special tree right there in the center.
Okay. That's Garden of Eden stuff. It's not terribly subtle. But there was no God. Just aliens in a spaceship. To me, that was like a slap in the face -- "We don't need your God. We've got the Greatest Story Ever Told -- right here! And it's not Christian!"
It just seemed spiteful in a way.
lol
If they limited the end to 1 ship and 2 children, I would have liked it more.
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