The sun has reached a milestone not seen for nearly 100 years: an entire month has passed without a single visible sunspot being noted.
According to data from Mount Wilson Observatory, UCLA, more than an entire month has passed without a spot. The last time such an event occurred was June of 1913. Sunspot data has been collected since 1749.
When the sun is active, it’s not uncommon to see sunspot numbers of 100 or more in a single month. Every 11 years, activity slows, and numbers briefly drop to near-zero. Normally sunspots return very quickly, as a new cycle begins.
But this year—which corresponds to the start of Solar Cycle 24—has been extraordinarily long and quiet, with the first seven months averaging a sunspot number of only 3. August followed with none at all. The astonishing rapid drop of the past year has defied predictions, and caught nearly all astronomers by surprise.
The impact of the 1859 storm was muted only by the infancy of our technological civilization at that time. Were it to happen today, it could severely damage satellites, disable radio communications and cause continent-wide electrical blackouts that would require weeks or longer to recover from. Although a storm of that magnitude is a comfortably rare once-in-500-years event, those with half its intensity hit every 50 years or so. The last one, which occurred on November 13, 1960, led to worldwide geomagnetic disturbances and radio outages. If we make no preparations, by some calculations the direct and indirect costs of another superstorm could equal that of a major hurricane or earthquake.
No one living today has ever experienced a full-blown superstorm, but telltale signs of them have turned up in some surprising places. In ice-core data from Greenland and Antarctica, Kenneth G. McCracken of the University of Maryland has discovered sudden jumps in the concentration of trapped nitrate gases, which in recent decades appear to correlate with known blasts of solar particles. A nitrate anomaly found for 1859 stands out as the biggest of the past 500 years, with the severity roughly equivalent to the sum of all the major events of the past 40 years.
At least our satellites have been specifically designed to function under the vagaries of space weather. Power grids, in contrast, are fragile at the best of times. Every year, according to estimates by Kristina Hamachi-LaCommare and Joseph H. Eto, both at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the U.S. economy takes an $80-billion hit from localized blackouts and brownouts. Declining power margins over the past decade have also left less excess capacity to keep up with soaring demands.
During solar storms, entirely new problems arise. Large transformers are electrically grounded to Earth and thus susceptible to damage caused by geomagnetically induced direct current (DC). The DC flows up the transformer ground wires and can lead to temperature spikes of 200 degrees Celsius or higher in the transformer windings, causing coolant to vaporize and literally frying the transformer. Even if transformers avoid this fate, the induced current can cause their magnetic cores to saturate during one half of the alternating-current power cycle, distorting the 50- or 60-hertz waveforms. Some of the power is diverted to frequencies that electrical equipment cannot filter out. Instead of humming at a pure pitch, transformers would begin to chatter and screech. Because a magnetic storm affects transformers all over the country, the condition can rapidly escalate to a network-wide collapse of voltage regulation. Grids operate so close to the margin of failure that it would not take much to push them over.
“It is harder to guard against other superstorm effects. X-ray energy deposition would cause the atmosphere to expand, enhancing the drag forces on military and commercial imaging and communications satellites that orbit below 600 kilometers in altitude. Japan’s Advanced Satellite for Cosmology and Astrophysics experienced just such conditions during the infamous Bastille Day storm on July 14, 2000, which set in motion a sequence of attitude and power losses that ultimately led to its premature reentry a few months later. During a superstorm, low-orbiting satellites would be at considerable risk of burning up in the atmosphere within weeks or months of the event.”
Aw Man, what if all that shit came down at once? Would it pull in all that space garbage? (The Space Control Center, part of United States Strategic Command (formerly the United States Space Command), currently tracks more than 8,500 objects larger than 10cm in Low Earth Orbit) Along with the space station and a whole lot of satellites carrying nasty shit like plutonium?
the most rational scenario abot 2012 i’ve arrived is the one related with the sun storms. in “the electric body” it is said that during some strong storms in 1948 a the income of people to the asylums was rather increased--but certainly not ALL PEOPLE in earth went mad. The thing is that maybe if that storms trigger anything in the brain, what we have now that was not avaliable in 1948 it is the internet--so maybe we will need to be watching on the internet for people with spiritual chrisis.
the most rational scenario abot 2012 i’ve arrived is the one related with the sun storms. in “the electric body” it is said that during some strong storms in 1948 a the income of people to the asylums was rather increased--but certainly not ALL PEOPLE in earth went mad. The thing is that maybe if that storms trigger anything in the brain, what we have now that was not avaliable in 1948 it is the internet--so maybe we will need to be watching on the internet for people with spiritual chrisis.
does this make any sense?
I think everyone on the internet is in some sort of spiritual chrisis. Most everyone offline as well.
Such seems to be the case in recent times, as Brad Singer, a geology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has discovered that the streaming, molten iron core, which generates most of Earth’s magnetic field capabilities, is currently becoming slower and weaker in its output. Apparently, Earth goes through this cycle at various intervals. The last all-time low registered by geologists was about 780,000 years ago, when the North and the South poles came dangerously close to shifting.
James Elsner, a climatologist at Florida State University in Tallahassee, has analyzed hurricane data going back more than a century. He says he has identified a 10- to 12-year cycle in hurricane records that corresponds to the solar cycle, in which the Sun’s magnetic activity rises and falls.
So, OK, maybe that’s disnfo in order to create apocalyptic doom belief system so aliens could come down to save us. There’s a chance too that it could be real, so i would like to hear second thoughts on this? Anyone?
Ulysses, a satellite operated by NASA and the European Space Agency, has been observing solar wind—charged particles ejected by the sun’s upper atmosphere—since its launch in 1990. It’s been around long enough to see two solar minimums, when the sun’s radiation reaches the lowest point in an 11-year cycle, and a solar maximum, when the sun spouts sunspots and spews its highest level of radiation. But what Ulysses found during the most recent solar minimum has surprised astrophysicists: The solar wind was 20 to 25 percent weaker than during the last minimum, NASA and ESA announced at a press conference on Tuesday, and the weakest since they began measuring it at the dawn of the space age a half-century ago.
Solar wind usually creates a bubble around our solar system called the heliosphere, which keeps out most cosmic rays from the rest of the galaxy. But a weak solar wind means a weak heliosphere, and more cosmic rays crossing through our area.”The smaller the heliosphere gets, the less shielding we get,” said Dave McCombs of the Southwest Research Institute.
Solar maximums are no picnic, either. When they occur, the sun produces many more coronal mass ejections (CMEs), intense bursts of cosmic rays often associated with sunspots. CMEs are certainly dangerous to astronauts, but, Crooker said, many NASA officials consider them the lesser of two evils when compared to a solar minimum. If cosmic rays come in short bursts, as in a CME, astronauts could take cover behind shielding and wait them out. But if weak solar wind and therefore weakened shielding continues, astronauts would have no place to hide from the constant barrage.
Man, that 2012 shit pisses me off. If any creature on earth could survive a crazy apocalypse it would be the humans. This shit seems to appeal only to people afraid to lose their fancy, lazy lifestyles. I would enjoy seeing it all get torn apart (although i would probably change my mind when members of my immediate family die). If we keep the technology then it would be like a cool Philip K. Dick book, and if we loose everything I am confident a percentage a humans will survive underground and in caves, and evolve into mole people. With long sharp claws for digging, super hearing, and elbino features. We could farm those crazy albino cave fish!
Yeah, actually that shit pisses me off too, i’m just curious. Sure 99% material on 2012 is milleniarism disguised as new ageism. But in the other hand i think there are some legitimate points on this. Maybe anything happens, sure, but if you are aware of cosmic consciousness and psycho-cosmic dinamics, well ... i’m just curious.
not sure about what you are talkin (english isn’t my first language). But the andrew collins’s stuff--who has blessings from jeremy narby, althought that isn’t supposed to mean anything--fits well with the claims of solar wind minimun linked with to more cosmic rays vulnerability. Anyway, I’m not a scientist, so if you could be more specific about the claims you’re refering too i would be glad to hear it.
Sorry for being unclear, i was drinking. So you are saying the environmental disaster will directly trigger a massive spiritual “change”? If the peak of this solar cycle is especially severe I could see that happening. I’ve got a friend who has allways been very sensitive to the effects of the solar wind stream that comes about every two to three weeks. I couldn’t believe it for a long time, but after monitoring spaceweather.com daily for the last two years I’m convinced. If the sunspots were to affect the rest of society in a similar way we are in for some trouble (total insanity). It’s the rest of the potential disasters that do not make sense to me. The magnetic pole switch is a VERY slow process, and there is there is this talk of asteroids and sudden global warming. Just one disaster would make sense, but how can you have 3 or 4 of them all set to happen in 2012?
in “the electric body†it is said that during some strong storms in 1948 a the income of people to the asylums was rather increased--but certainly not ALL PEOPLE in earth went mad. The thing is that maybe if that storms trigger anything in the brain, what we have now that was not avaliable in 1948 it is the internet--so maybe we will need to be watching on the internet for people with spiritual chrisis.
here’s the quote from “The electric body” (i got the year wrong):
During the International Geophysical Year of 1957-58, I’d been a volunteer in the Aurora Watch Program. To find out whether the northern lights appeared simultaneously throughout the north latitudes in response to changes in the earth’s magnetic field (they did), IGY organizers recruited a worldwide network of amateur observers to go out into their backyards every night and look at the sky. All of us got weekly reports on the state of the field from the national magnetic observatory at Fredericksburg, Virginia. I decided to go back through this data and see if there was any correlation between the disturbances in earth’s field caused by magnetic storms on the sun, and the rate of psychiatric admissions to our VA hospital.
Luckily for me, Howard Friedman, the hospital’s chief of psychology, was collecting donations door to door for a local Boy Scout troop at about this time. At one house, the family dog took an instant dislike to him and bit his ankle. After bandaging the wound, Howard’s doctor gave him a tetanus booster shot. As luck would have it, Howard came down with a rare allergic reaction that involved fever, fatigue, nausea, and painful swelling of all the joints.
Since I was the nearest bone-and-joint man, Howard came to see me.
This type of reaction is frightening, but not dangerous, and disappears of its own accord in a day or two. After I made the diagnosis and reassured him, we sat and talked for a few minutes. After some chitchat about the shortcomings of the hospital administration, he gestured at the papers tacked all over the walls of my office and asked, “What are all those charts?” I told him about my magnetic brainstorms.
He obviously thought I was as crazy as the people whose admissions I was charting, and probably wondered about the advice I’d just given.
However, after hearing the background, he agreed it wasn’t as silly as it sounded, and offered to help. It was a real break for me, since he was already a respected researcher, and a practical, open-minded one to boot.
My diagnosis was correct, and our collaboration lasted almost two decades.
Howard’s reputation got us access to the records of state psychiatric hospitals, giving us a sample large enough to be statistically useful. We matched the admissions of over twenty-eight thousand patients at eight hospitals against sixty-seven magnetic storms over the previous four Breathing with the Earth 245 years. The relationship was there: Significantly more persons were signed in to the psychiatric services just after magnetic disturbances than when the field was stable. Of course, such a finding could only serve as a guide to further investigation, because so many factors determined whether a person sought psychiatric help, but we felt that other influences would even out over such a large number of patients.
Next we looked for the same type of influence in patients already hospitalized. We selected a dozen schizophrenics who were scheduled to remain in the VA hospital for the next few months with no changes in treatment. We asked the ward nurses to fill out a standard evaluation of their behavior once every eight-hour shift. Then we correlated the results with cosmic ray measurements taken every two hours from government measuring stations in Ontario and Colorado. Since magnetic storms were generally accompanied by a decrease in the cosmic radiation reaching earth, we thought we might find changes in the patients’ actions and moods during these declines. We decided to use cosmic rays instead of direct reports of the magnetic field strength because of problems in distinguishing between magnetic storms and other variations in the earth’s field.
The nurses reported various behavior changes in almost all the subjects one or two days after cosmic ray decreases. This was a revealing delay, for one type of incoming radiation—low-energy cosmic ray flares from the sun—was known to produce strong disruptions in the earth’s field one or two days later.
i’m not talking about an event. i’m talking that it could be happening right now. as noted above:
Solar wind usually creates a bubble around our solar system called the heliosphere, which keeps out most cosmic rays from the rest of the galaxy. But a weak solar wind means a weak heliosphere, and more cosmic rays crossing through our area.
so right now we are being irradiated with lots of cosmic rays. If andrew collins is right and cosmic rays somehow can affect dna or mind or wathever we could be right now literally mutating:
if again collins is right and cygnus at the top of the dark rift on the center of the milky way is the principal cosmic ray irradiator on the galaxy, in 21/12/2012 we are as to say perpendicular to it--like being below the sun at 12:00pm. Also, at that time are predicted huge solar storms.
what i’m saying, and this is only speculation, that maybe the “galactic alignment"--and galactic aligment comes from alternative archeology research, not channeling--could trigger some reaction on sensible types. Also, there’s the issue of “global consciousness field”. That day we will have a lot of people focusing on the event--there’s even a fixed hour, on 11:11. So maybe it could trigger anything. But maybe only a little bunch of people will be aware on this--the shamanic types, i speculate. For more info about the “global consciousness field” you can dig http://noosphere.princeton.edu/ (and maybe that’s related to schumman resonance: here there is lot of tasty info: http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=946&start=0&st=0&sk=t&sd=a)
hope have made my point clear and yes
i’m sick of 2012
War and Sunspot Cycles: A Form of Electromagnetic Pollution
Could cycles of war, peace be tied to cycles of the sun?
TV, cell phone towers, power lines, and house appliances—while they make our lives more convenient, they also contribute to polluting our electromagnetic atmosphere.
A growing number of scientists, health care professionals, and concerned citizens argue that these invisible frequencies are responsible for a host of various health problems. Meanwhile, the largest polluter has gone unnoticed: the sun. At certain times, the sun’s activity can also aggravate mental health problems.
Every 10–11 years, the number of sunspots found on our closest star rise from 0 (as it is currently in 2008) to a high of over 400. While the sunspots themselves don’t affect Earth, the solar flares and other disturbances emanating from our sun during increased sunspot activity result in an increased number of particles (electrons and protons) and harmful light radiation (ultraviolet and x-rays), known as solar wind. If it weren’t for Earth’s protective magnetic field and atmosphere, this bombardment of particles would burn us to a crisp!
Fortunately, our planet’s magnetic field diverts most particles into a circular path around the Earth. Like weather patterns found on Earth, solar wind patterns can change rapidly. Luckily, our planet’s magnetosphere quickly responds to the threat and absorbs the impact, wiggling and jiggling in the process. Geophysicists call this reaction a geomagnetic storm, but because of how it disrupts the Earth’s magnetic field, it could also be called electromagnetic pollution.
These storms, although minute, affect brain waves and hormone levels, causing a number of different reactions, predominately in males. While a few women may also experience changes during these storms, they generally seem less affected by the sun’s behavior.
Reacting to changing hormone levels, some men may become increasingly irritable and aggressive, while others may instead become more creative. An increase in solar activity is found to increase psychotic episodes in individuals who already suffer from unstable psychological states. While we might relate such behavior to a full moon, in 1963, Dr. Robert Becker and his colleague, Dr. Freedman, demonstrated that solar changes also lead to a noticeable increase in psychotic activity.
Yet these reactions are not simply isolated to a few particularly sensitive or unlucky individuals. Evidence indicates that wars and international conflicts most often break out when sunspots are rapidly forming or rapidly decaying, as these are times when there are more intense geomagnetic storms.
In addition, this increase in solar activity also correlates to periods of more accidents and illness, as well as an increase of crimes and murders. The entire biosphere is affected by this electromagnetic pollution, and human behavior seems to react accordingly.
