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The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states that in England 1014 AD, on the eve of St. Michael’s day (September 28, 1014) “came the great sea-flood, which spread wide over this land, and ran so far up as it never did before, overwhelming many towns, and an innumerable multitude of people.” This is clearly a reference to a tsunami similar to the one that struck Indonesia in December 2004 which killed over 250,000 people. What could have caused this tsunami? Could a meteor or comet impact in the Atlantic Ocean have been the cause? Researcher Dallas Abbott of the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory...

Romano-British citizens who no longer had the protection of the Roman Empire were so terrified of the raiding Saxons, Angles, Picts and others that they buried their most valuable belongings. According to an entry from 418 in the 9th-century text Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, "In this year the Romans collected all the treasures which were in Britain and hid some in the earth so that no one afterwards could find them, and some they took with them into Gaul." ... Because no organic materials survived in the Hoxne hoard, radiocarbon can't be used as a dating technique. Instead, archaeologists use the age...

Phil PlaitNovember 16, 2015 A new study says that violent space weather that could cost $2 trillion in damage is more common than previously thought In the years 774 and 993, the Earth was attacked from space. Not by aliens, but by a natural event—and it was very, very powerful. Whatever it was, it subtly altered the chemistry of our planet’s atmosphere, creating trace amounts of radioactive elements like chlorine-36, beryllium-10, and carbon-14. And those provide the clue to what the event was: Those isotopes are created when high-energy protons slam into our air. That means the source must have...

From the AGU weekly highlights: Large solar proton event explains 774-775 CE carbon-14 increase Tree ring records indicate that in 774-775 CE, atmospheric carbon-14 levels increased substantially. Researchers suggest that a solar proton event may have been the cause. In solar proton events, large numbers of high-energy protons are emitted from the Sun, along with other particles. If these particles reach EarthÂ’s atmosphere, they ionize the atmosphere and induce nuclear reactions that produce higher levels of carbon-14; the particles also cause chemical reactions that result in depletion of ozone in the ozone layer, allowing harmful ultraviolet radiation to reach the...

Just over 1,200 years ago, the planet was hit by an extremely intense burst of high-energy radiation of unknown cause, scientists studying tree-ring data have found. The radiation burst, which seems to have hit between AD 774 and AD 775, was detected by looking at the amounts of the radioactive isotope carbon-14 in tree rings that formed during the AD 775 growing season in the Northern Hemisphere. The increase in 14C levels is so clear that the scientists, led by Fusa Miyake, a cosmic-ray physicist from Nagoya University in Japan, conclude that the atmospheric level of 14C must have jumped...

According to an Old English manuscript chronicling the history of the Anglo-Saxons, a mysterious "red crucifix" appeared in the "heavens" over Britain one evening in A.D. 774. Now astronomers say it may have been the supernova explosion that sprinkled unexplained traces of carbon-14 in tree rings that year, halfway around the world in Japan. Jonathon Allen, an undergraduate student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, made the connection this week after listening to a Nature podcast. He heard a team of Japanese scientists discussing new research in which they measured an odd spike in carbon-14 levels in tree rings...