Via SpaceWeather.com
More than 14 thousand years ago, there was a solar storm so big, trees still remember it. Dwarfing modern solar storms, the event would devastate technology if it happened again today. Spoiler alert: It could.
Subfossil trees along the banks of the Drouzet river in France [ref]
The record-strong storm is described by a paper in the upcoming July 2025 edition of the peer-reviewed journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters. It occured in 12,350 BC and is classified as a “Miyake Event.”
Miyake Events are solar storms that make the Carrington Event of 1859 look puny. Trees “remember” them in their rings, which store the carbon-14 created by gargantuan storms. At least six Miyake Events have been discovered and confirmed since Fusa Miyake found the first one in 2012. The list so far includes 664-663 BC, 774 AD, 993 AD, 5259 BC, 7176 BC, and 12,350 BC.
The Miyake Event of 12,350 BC is especially intriguing. It appears as a carbon-14 spike in Scots Pine trees along the banks of the Drouzet river in France, with a matching beryllium-10 spike in Greenland ice cores. The event was global and, based on the size of the spikes, very big.
At first, no one could say how big the storm was because it happened during the Ice Age.
Carbon-14 storage is complicated. When a solar storm creates carbon-14 in the upper atmosphere, the radioisotope doesn’t immediately appear in the woody flesh of trees. Getting there involves months to years of atmospheric circulation influenced by climate and geography, and even then the carbon-14 has to arrive during the tree’s growing season, otherwise it won’t be “taken up.” High-altitude trees are favored because they encounter the carbon-14 first, while different species each have their own sensitivity.
All these factors are a harder to tease out in the Ice Age. Most known Miyake Events occurred after the Ice Age, during the Holocene, a period of relatively stable and warm climate starting about 12,000 years ago. Climate scientists have atmospheric circulation models for the Holocene, so interpreting Miyake Events in 7176 BC, 5259 BC, 664-663 BC, 993 AD, 774 AD was relatively straightforward. Not so, the event of 12,350 BC.
To solve this problem, Kseniia Golubenko and Ilya Usoskin from the University of Oulu in Finland developed a chemistry-climate model (SOCOL:14C-Ex) specifically for Ice Age solar storms. It takes into account ice sheet boundaries, sea levels, and geomagnetic fields that existed during the Pleistocene’s Late Glacial period. Using this model, they were able to interpret tree ring data for 12,350 BC.
According to their paper, 12,350 BC is the biggest Miyake Event yet. It produced a hailstorm of solar particles 500 times greater than the most intense solar particle storm recorded by modern satellites in 2005. During the 2005 event, an airline passenger flying over the poles might have received a year’s worth of sea-level cosmic radiation in just one hour. During the 12350 BC event, the same dose would have been received in a mere eight seconds.
This would seem to set a new standard for worst-case scenarios in space weather. However, the real news is deeper: The door to the Ice Age has been kicked open by SOCOL:14C-Ex. Older tree rings may now be interpreted with confidence, potentially revealing even worse storms.
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We should be constructing our homes, garages and buildings with built-in Faraday Cages in the external walls and roof especially since the Carrington Event is well known
Rebar in concrete is a good start. Perhaps lead glass in windows.
A Faraday cage does not need to be grounded to protect sensitive electrical/electronic components within its volume. However, without grounding, the cage can become a large antenna, picking up external electromagnetic interference and radiating it back into the environment.
It is not easy to ground rebar already in concrete, nor “lead glass windows” which are not used for most residential and commercial buildings.
The gaps in rebar are far too large to be any use as a Faraday enclosure. The spacing of the conductors must be smaller than the wavelength of the electromagnetic energy being blocked. Solar EM emissions are broad spectrum, so the spacing must be ~ < centimeters to be effective. Welded seam steel, copper or aluminum sheeting over the enclosure would work. For the energy of this sort of event, the current carrying capacity to multiple grounding rods spaced around the enclosure must also be fairly large.
Electrical Engineer
Perhaps multiple layers of stacked and offset chicken wire fencing wrapping the structure, under the roofing plywood as well, with a stucco coating on the outside and grounding every 10′ and at all corners
Hardware cloth is pretty robust and has an opening of 1/4 inch, or about 0.64 cm, so it would be good for frequencies up to about 4.6 GHz. Add some aluminum or steel window screen to that and you’d be pretty tight.
The current carrying capacity of the hardware cloth might be overwhelmed pretty quickly in a storm such as described in the article. It would work for lesser solar storms. An EMP strike … not so much.
You are describing #4 hardware cloth (4 openings per square inch). It also comes #5, #8, and others, I presume.
How about aluminum siding and a steel shingle roof?
Just wrap your house in heavy-duty aluminum foil. It’s a lot cheaper than many solutions.
I’m not sure why you got downvotes on this! We are going to get nailed sooner or later with one of these and when it happens, will be catastrophic to our way of life. It might happen tomorrow, next year or 100 years from now, but it will happen and anything with electronics will be effected. Even your automobile, EV or ICE, has enough electronics in it to be disabled. A Faraday Cage isn’t that hard to construct if designed correctly and would help. Your house doesn’t need to be one, but modules containing sensitive devices could be a possibility or we could produce appliances and devices with the cage as part of it.
How am I going to steal the neighbors’ WiFi if we all do that?
Window mounted booster – just make sure the neighbor can’t see it.
Bring back tin foil hats!
OK, post Carrington- or Miyake-type event, you’ve got your Faraday-cage home intact with all its electrical and electronics device operational. However, you now find the electrical grid supplying power to your house non-operational and all RF/TV transmissions off-the-air because they were not likewise protected from the associated EMP damage.
Now what?
Easy Peasy.. bicycle with a generator. You should be able to put out 100 watts. 10 hours a day will get you to 1kWh.
What about cell phones? Kids today would be totally lost and confused without cell phones.
Oh. Wait. They already are.
Or a windmill.
Now, you don’t get to harvest the repair subsidies because protected yourself.
You simply wait for system repair.
It’d be cool. I worked in a faraday cage one time located at a radio telescope site. The faraday cage had a pneumatic controlled vault door and inside was completely covered with a fine copper mesh. Absolutely loved the entry door. *** swoooosh clank clank – door opens ***
All that so I could use my laptop.
Why do we think that people began living in caves and underground at certain times in human history and could it also have had an influence on the Megafauna extinction?
Our ancestors were living out doors during these events, and they survived.
Well, first, that would essentially destroy the cellphone industry. Personally, I could live without them, but I suspect the younger generations might not approve.
The bigger issue, though, is that the Carrington effect increases the longer an exposed electrical wire is. Basically, the grid would spark out in multiple places, fry electrical devices, cause a great many fires, and of course, eventually collapse. The Faraday Cage would be virtually worthless since the electrical drop to your home is bringing in the danger.
From the above article:
“At least six Miyake Events have been discovered and confirmed since Fusa Miyake found the first one in 2012.”
(my bold emphasis added)
I have been informed, repeatedly, that gas bubbles captured in ice cores from both Greenland (EGRIP/Summit) and Antarctica (Vostok, Law Dome, Dome C, South Pole Station, etc.) are representative of atmospheric gas species and relative concentrations at the time of their enclosure in surrounding ice.
If this were true, then why haven’t they shown evidence of the momentary “blips” in atmospheric C-14 due to the six Miyake Events stated to have occurred over the last 15,000 years per the above article?
IOW, why haven’t these events recently revealed by tree rings not previously been revealed by data from ice cores?
Note: yes, I noted the article’s reference to “a matching beryllium-10 spike in Greenland ice cores”, but what happened to the atmospheric C-14???
BTW, if the frequency and intensity of Miyake Events are scientifically confirmed, then I think humanity has much more immediate threats to worry about than asteroid/meteor impacts!
You’re right that this should be of concern.
With regard to questions around ice cores, the time constant for “recording” atmospheric concentrations of species is even longer (slower) for ice cores as it has all of the confounding issues that tree rings have in addition to required diffusion into snow firn and its eventual sealing/closure. Fast events might not be captured because the magnitude of these events is smoothed/spread out.
“. . . might not . . .”, or should be?
Even if a single event (i.e. one year) production of excess C-14 is smeared over a decade—that is, mixed with ten years worth in an ice gas bubble before it becomes totally encapsulated by ice, that would still leave a significant signal for C-14 detection barring more frequent intervals of unusual C-14 production.
What about O-18 dating for earlier events, (up to a million or so years ago?)
Yeah, what about it?
The above article made no mention of tracking delta-oxygen-18 (δ¹⁸O). Delta-oxygen-18 in Earth’s atmosphere is primarily produced by the interplay of evaporation and condensation/precipitation processes, which lead to the preferential fractionation of oxygen isotopes. Delta-oxygen-18 is not produced by the solar wind or by solar flares or storms impacting Earth’s magnetosphere or atmosphere (see attached screen grab).
Tree-rings are known to capture delta-oxygen-18 variations (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048969720374702 )
just like bubbles in ice cores are (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277379101001068 ).
Gas bubbles in ice cores also capture variations in atmospheric C-14 (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0016703716000065 ).
So, now where do we go?
Still a theoretical model.
Radio telescope tour included Faraday cages to isolate us and the computers from the telescopes:
The Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory (DRAO) located near Keremeos, BC, at 717 White Lake Road, Kaleden.
I know, correlation is not causation, but this interesting. I extracted these signals from the acceleration of the Sun around the barycenter. The dashed line is a fixed 940-year cycle for reference.
What is red? What is blue?
What’s the vertical scale?
The vertical scales and colors aren’t relevant. The plots relate to the Jovian planets. What’s annoying is that I placed a marker at 1250 BC, not 12,500 BC. My error. I should have waited for the morning coffee to kick in before posting.
From the above article:
“The (Miyaki Event) list so far includes 664-663 BC, 774 AD, 993 AD, 5259 BC, 7176 BC, and 12,350 BC.”
12,350 BC to 7,176 BC is 5,174 years (= 5.504 cycles having a 940-year period),
7,176 BC to 5,259 BC is 1,917 years (= 2.039 cycles having a 940-year period),
5,259 BC to 663 BC is 4,596 years (= 4.889 cycles having a 940-year period),
663 BC to 774 AD is 1,437 years (= 1.529 cycles having a 940-year period), and
774 AD to 993 AD is 219 years (= 0.233 cycles having a 940-year period).
So, what “correlation” to Miyaki Events are you assigning to the 940-year orbital period of the Sun around the solar system’s barycenter?
I’m not, see previous comment. The 940-year cycle relates to temperature.
It is 863 years not 940 years. 4*863 (3453) years is the intervals between the the three coldest temperatures of the last 9000 years in GISP2. At 6150 BC, 2700 BC, and 750 AD, which were high solar periods with positive North Atlantic Oscillation regimes. Warm spikes in GISP2 are grand solar minima, with negative NAO regimes driving a warmer AMO.
I looked at your previous comment, and even the one before that (the one with the graph indicating a constant 940-year cycle), and find no mention of “temperature” in either.
Also, anyone that believes the “GISP2 temperature reconstruction” going back more than, oh, 500 years ago—that is, before the ability of humans to measure temperature using thermometers—is meaningful to the resolution of 0.1 deg C (or even 1 deg C!) as indicated in you graph is . . . well, is to be pitied.
Climate scientists have atmospheric circulation models for the Holocene, so interpreting Miyake Events in 7176 BC, 5259 BC, 664-663 BC, 993 AD, 774 AD was relatively straightforward.
Uh, huh. Straightforward, sure. Using those same atmospheric circulation models to predict imminent, catastrophic, human-caused global warming and sea level rise—that isn’t happening anywhere near what’s been predicted—was also “straightforward.” I suspect there’s a lot of wiggle room in dating those massive solar storms.
Who would seriously assert that ANY atmospheric circulation model for the Holocene would have resolution down to a single year for any hindcast back to 774 AD, let alone back to 7,176 BC?
Yep, it’s straightforward . . . straightforward BS, that is!
P.S. And, yeah, anyone that believes that subfossil “Scots Pine trees along the banks of the Drouzet river in France” have tree rings that can be scientifically and accurately dated back to exactly 12,350 years BC (as asserted in the above article’s fourth paragraph) is full of it as well.
We would have several day’s warning of such an event hitting the Earth. If you are so inclined, you could make a Faraday cage for select devices using Igloo coolers and aluminum foil.
Or start living in a cave.
Or just bend over and kiss something goodbye.
Guys, guys – settle down. Micro-electronics are not at risk from solar geomagnetic storms so a faraday cage is useless and a waste of time. Where they *are* needed are for EMP events caused by nuclear explosions. It’s the power distribution grid which is at risk like what happened in Ontario, Canada back in 1989.
https://spaceweatherarchive.com/2021/03/12/the-great-quebec-blackout/
Geomagnetic disturbances (GMD) cause geomagnetically induced currents (GIC) to flow in long engineered conductor systems such as power grids, pipelines, and railway systems. GICs are the manifestation of space weather driven by solar activity. Disturbances on Earth’s geomagnetic field induce a geoelectric field at the Earth’s surface, which drives GIC. Since frequencies smaller than 1 Hz dominate the power spectrum of the geoelectric field, GIC behaves like a DC current when compared to the 50 or 60 Hz AC power systems. These quasi-DC (as also called “zero sequence” in the engineering terminology) currents flow through transmission lines and enter/exit the power grid through grounded transformer neutrals.
The flow of GIC can drive power transformers into half-cycle saturation, increasing the reactive power consumed by the transformer, injecting even and odd harmonics into the system, and potentially generating hot spots in the windings and/or structural components. Combined, these effects may result in equipment loss of life, equipment damage, and/or a system-wide disturbance; the most famous impact of a geomagnetic disturbance is the Hydro-Quebec blackout in March 1989.
Ref: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2016SW001501
The immediate problem of a Carrington-like event (a solar flare or CME) hitting Earth or a Miyaki-like solar storm affecting Earth (as discussed in the above article) isn’t so much the resulting geomagnetically induced currents as it is the direct electromagnetic pulse (EMP) created when the wavefront of solar particles and entrained magnetic fields impact the Earth’s magnetosphere and ionosphere.
Flares/CMEs travel at speeds ranging from about 250 kilometers per second (km/s) to as fast as 3000 km/s, thus passing across Earth’s diameter in less than a minute or so. The resulting geomagnetic storm that comes afterward can last from hours to days.
For more on this and practical mitigation see https://solartsunamis.otago.ac.nz/
If you have not already read it, I suggest that the article
https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2022.0497
will be most illuminating in the context of this post.
The article is well written and clear.
During the 1859 Carrington flare, the telegraph was run on an induced current with the batteries disconnected. The relatively small 1989 flare(s) collapsed Quebec’s grid, via its convenient alternate path. There are suggestions (in the article referenced earlier) that the Earth’s response to an extreme impulse event is not necessarily an impulse event itself.
In that case, IF large induced currents might flow for a few years in a ‘ring down’, life could become tedious, even with the free electricity. Tesla would be exonerated, at least.
It is ONLY in the past 200 years that civilization could be severely impacted by Miyake level flares. No one was flying over the poles in jet aircraft before 1960.
We are in an entirely NEW, marvelous, and vulnerable, technological era.
The proliferation of vast grids to connect wind turbines and photovoltaics could provide a bypass to the usual ground, at least temporarily. It might be wise to have your own disconnect switch handy, and to wrap your sensitive electronics and backup drives in Faraday cages! You should get a day’s warning or more, plenty of time.
I would bet no one really knows how and if the vast AI and other electronic data bases are protected. Ask the IRS! If protection is not secure, then, who knows what might be accomplished by a single very large flare ala ‘Snake Plisken’. We cannot expect ‘Deus ex Machina’ to save even a few children, as in “Knowing (2009),” Fortunately, such a flare has not occurred in billions of years of the Sun’s existence; in so far as we know.
Isn’t speculation fun?
This “knowledge” seems to me to be based on proxies and models and scientific wild ass guesses.
In other words, I don’t believe them.
Could they be interpreting the data right, and building their models right and guessing the “fill in the gaps” information right? Sure they could be.
Is it likely that they are? Not in my experience.
“Scientists” get grants and win awards not for saying “nothing to see here, move along” but by “discovering” world changing events and making breathless warnings about how we’re all gonna die.
Could some of them be right? Of course…but how do you separate the wheat from the chaff? We know solar storms happen and can cause havoc so we should do our best to harden our systems against those events to the extent practical.
We should continue to research methods of protecting against those events just like we should continue to research alternative power sources and more efficient resource utilization, but without freaking out about it and bankrupting ourselves in the process.
We should do those things regardless of the “end of the world is nigh” sensationalism of the Scientific community and/or the media who overhype theoretical findings beyond what is warranted by the actual research…because those industries make their money off those sensational headlines and stories.
I believe there is something missing from this interesting discussion. The Earth’s magnetic field strength is weakening. This is a good short video that provides an overview of the data.
Bing Videos
Some believe that the weakening is speeding up. We will see.
The main point is that if the Earth’s magnetic field continues to weaken, the Earth will be more exposed to space weather. Whether this will be a big deal or not is anyone’s guess,
993 + 863 = 1856 (Carrington event 1859)
774 + 863 = 1637 (large auroras seen in China 1638 and 1649)
663 BC + 3*863 = 1925 (major solar storm in 1921)
5292 BC + 7*863 = 781 (7 years after 774)
12.350 BC + 6*863 = 7172 BC (7176 BC)
The same cycle orders a series of grand solar minima every 863 years, from 2225 BC, 1365 BC, 500 BC, 350 AD, 1215 AD, and the next series is from around 2095.
Well, except for the fact that your accounting for 863-year “cycles” for grand solar minima does not agree with commonly accepted facts.
Here’s a list of years that are considered part of known/predicted grand solar minima:
• 690 AD: a grand minimum around this time (the closest you state is 350 AD)
• 1040-1080 AD (Oort Minimum): a period of low solar acivity
• 1280-1350 AD (Wolf Minimum): another period of reduced solar activity (the closest you state is 1215 AD)
• 1460-1550 AD (Spörer Minimum): a long period of low sunspot activity
• 1645-1715 AD (Maunder Minimum): a significant period with very few sunspots and colder temperatures on Earth (you didn’t mention this)
• 1790-1820 AD (Dalton Minimum): a period of reduced solar activity
• 2020-2053: a modern grand solar minimum is predicted to start around 2020 and continue until about 2053 (the closest you state is 2095).
Also, I notice that you didn’t make any reference to the Miyake Event of 7,176 BC (with any arbitrary number of 863 year intervals added to it, as you did for the other listed years of Miyake Events).
Oh well . . . GIGO.
The Early Antique Little Ice Age from 350 AD was the first grand minimum in that series, from around 690 was the fourth centennial minimum in that series.
Dates given for the Oort minimum are all over the place, e.g. 1010-1050, 1020-1060, 1040-1080. My empirical modeling shows the Oort minimum to be only two solar cycles long, starting around 1015. The following centennial minimum from 1115 was also short at two solar cycles long, but was colder for the land mid latitudes than during Oort, and it doesn’t even have a name. There is also an unnamed centennial minimum from 1550.
Many don’t accept Dalton being a grand minimum as it was so short. The dates you quote for Wolf, Sporer, Maunder, and Dalton are also all sloppy and inaccurate.
I didn’t intend to name each centennial through the Little Ice Age series, I was only noting when the series began.
Predictions for a GSM 2020-2053 will certainly fail.
Your “commonly accepted facts” are largely repeating what others have got wrong. And your hot head missed my reference to 7176 BC.
Really?
It was YOU that posted:
“993 + 863 = 1856 (Carrington event 1859)
774 + 863 = 1637 (large auroras seen in China 1638 and 1649)
663 BC + 3*863 = 1925 (major solar storm in 1921)
5292 BC + 7*863 = 781 (7 years after 774)
12.350 BC + 6*863 = 7172 BC (7176 BC)”,
thereby establishing a pattern of: (year of a Miyake Event) + n*(863 years) = year of major perturbation in Sun.
Interestingly, you apply values of n = 1, 3 6 and 7 but exclude intermediate values of 2, 4 and 5. What’s up with that?
My reference to you “missing the Miyake Event of 7,176 BC” referred to you not including that Event date in your listing, NOT that you didn’t included the year of 7172 (close enough) as some time of claimed major solar perturbation.
However, if you admit that “n” could include the value of zero, then of course:
7176 BC + 0*863 = 7176 BC
ROTFL, maybe because my head is hot . . . maybe for another reason.
Ahhh . . . posted with confidence, but absent any supporting references.
In rebuttal, there is this (among other references):
“By about 2030-2040, the Sun will experience a new grand solar minimum. This is evident from multiple studies of quite different characteristics: the phasing of sunspot cycles, the cyclic observations of North Atlantic behaviour over the past millennium, the cyclic pattern of cosmogenic radionuclides in natural terrestrial archives, the motions of the Sun with respect to the centre of mass, the planetary spin-orbit coupling, the planetary conjunction history and the general planetary-solar-terrestrial interaction.”
(from the abstract of the scientific paper available at https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=61284 )
Morner had the solar forcing of the AMO backwards, the AMO is always warmer during centennial solar minima, when the solar wind is weaker, and it is colder when the solar wind is stronger. Getting that backwards is a far greater error than a poor prediction of solar variability.