8 ms·

Radioactive traces in tree rings reveal Earth’s history of ‘radiation storms’

136 points by sohkamyung 4y ago

sph 4y ago
Massive solar storms are fascinating to me. They seem to be quite common in the scale of "catastrophic disasters", there is a chance it would completely destroy the modern life we are used to, yet compared to other catastrophes, the damage to human life would be minimal. Sure, someone really depends on an electrical gizmo to survive, but most of us would wake up to a world without machines that we rely on daily, yet everything we actually need to survive is intact. There are fruit on trees, water is still flowing and drinkable, boars still roam the forests. It would be like waking up to a very familiar, yet completely alien world for the vast majority of us.
- dan_mctree 4y ago
  >yet everything we actually need to survive is intact. Unfortunately we now rely on our machines to survive. If they'd suddenly disappear, we'd have a bit of a massive problem. We just wouldn't do very well without our heavy agricultural machines, our food and fuel supply systems, our water pumps, our fertilizer plants, etc. We're not going to feed 7 billion people without machines anymore, so we'd better fix them fast or risk losing a lot of us.
  - i386 4y ago
    Sadly being proactive about these issues is not incentivized in our society until something very bad happens. Recent events come to mind.
- mjburgess 4y ago
  This view always facinates and alarms me. Don't we know that at 7bn people this hasnt been true for millenia? We're talking c. 5,000 apes in a jungle last time this made sense. Don't we know that the earth isnt just provided by god designed for human life? We have been nearly extinct many times, and our labour is required (via, at least, hunting) to make the world habitable for us. Don't we know that nature is a place of choas and extremes, and technology and economics exist primarily to prevent the day-to-day mass death which was common? Don't we know that half of the 100bn who've ever lived died before 20? Don't we know that famine, mass death, mass infant death, mass death in child birth (5-10%), etc. are "the default" ? This strange "nature utopianism" I have always found profoundly pesimissitic and "evil-projecting", since it locates evil in all the solutions to the problems of nature we have struggled to create. If you think "turning off civilisation" will have us wandering around forests, you're about gauarneteed to see what people have done over the last 200k years as evil.
  - mach1ne 4y ago
    While hunter-gathering is no Garden of Eden, I don't think it's as bad as you describe for the simple fact that evolution has molded us to it specifically. Earth isn't designed for human life, but human life most certainly is designed for Earth.
    - mjburgess 4y ago
      No, I dont think so. Would you say that to all the extinct species? There's nothing guaranteeing you don't starve. There is no design. Genes are just "random reproductive bets" with fairly high probabilities of failure over the long-run. The environment is basically guaranteed to change faster than your species can evolve, including via meteor. I dont think the rabbits who die alive eaten by foxes, and the foxes which starve from eating all the rabbits regard that cycle as "designed for them". Nor likewise, were the dinosaurs that impressed by the sky going dark. This idea that "we had a home" or "there was once Eden" in any respect is wrong. The life which we were evolved for is one in which if you survived 10, then you might not survive the lion, and if you survive that, not the volcano, and so on. Your body is just a bet made over millions of years, and not one any conservative gambler would take.
      - mach1ne 4y ago
        Extinct species become extinct because there is some change in their environment to which they are not successful at adapting. Generally speaking, neither the human genome or the wilderness of Earth has changed since we built our first huts. You're correct in your regard for exceedingly high child mortality, though it bears no weight on the survival of humanity as a whole in a technology-breaking event. The human body is indeed a bet, and one that has paid off for ~300,000 years and about 12,000 generations, if we start counting from Homo Sapiens. I'd very much take that bet any day.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        wiredfool 4y ago
- keewee7 4y ago
  >yet everything we actually need to survive is intact. There are fruit on trees, water is still flowing and drinkable, boars still roam the forests This is completely wrong. The natural biomass is not enough to support 7.8 billion people. Without modern industrialized food production the vast majority of people are going to die.
  - causi 4y ago
    Yes. Even rolling agricultural technology back a hundred years would require killing off fifty percent of the population.
    - dotancohen 4y ago
      > rolling agricultural technology back a hundred years would require killing off fifty percent of the population. Only 50 years! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice
  - _0w8t 4y ago
    [dead]
    - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
      What machines were you planning to plant and harvest that wheat with?
      - _0w8t 4y ago
        Another example is farmers in Belarus during WWII. Often the whole villages together with tools and machinery if it was any were burned down due to heavy fighting. People survived by living in dugouts and planting potato’s by hands. Potato in especially suitable in such situations. It brings more calories per area than even rice while one still can harvest it using basic sticks. While it cannot be stored for years after the harvest as wheat, it still can last for couple of years.
    - 4y ago
- pronlover723 4y ago
  As someone that once lived without running water for just 5 days because the electric pump to my apartment was broken I can say pretty confidently that that minor experience was enough to make it clear to me, most of us can't survive without "modern life". If there's no electricity there's no running water. That means no more flushing toilets. No more water to drink. If there's no electricity that means no more gas pumps so no trucks to deliver food. No refrigeration to store the food. It also means no communication to coordinate anything. I'm sure I'm only covering the tip of the iceberg. A large percentage of the planet would die from an event like this.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  > Sure, someone really depends on an electrical gizmo to survive, but most of us would wake up to a world without machines that we rely on daily, yet everything we actually need to survive is intact. There are fruit on trees, water is still flowing and drinkable, boars still roam the forests. That would be true for like, 15 minutes. Then the realization hits: we eat it all, and there's no more left until the next growing season or whatever, meanwhile we'll be hungry tomorrow. No. The fate of humanity, were the machines to suddenly stop working, is most of it dead within first couple weeks. Not only the nature cannot support 7 billion humans without technology to make it, not only we're not tooled out for doing agriculture the "old-school" way, but also most people now live in the cities. Cities do not produce food. If you live in a city, and the machines disappear, or the economy collapses, you will starve to death, unless someone kills you first.
  - jobs_throwaway 4y ago
    >If you live in a city, and the machines disappear, or the economy collapses, you will starve to death, unless someone kills you first. This is hyperbolic. Plenty of economies have collapsed without everyone starving to death or being murdered. Will it be pretty? No, but not as hopeless as you're making it out to be.
    - TeMPOraL 4y ago
      > Plenty of economies have collapsed without everyone starving to death or being murdered. Not in the last 50 years, not at the scale I'm talking about. Not to the point food stops being made, stored or transported, and there is no "outside" (such as international aid) to help. Closest to that would be warn-torn zones, where people in fact do starve and die. There's hardly any hyperbole here. With the entire food sector operating just-in-time, at any given moment a modern city has enough food to last a week or two, and that's with refrigeration running. In case of global economic collapse or even global power outage, that's all you'll get in the city. There will be no more food coming after that.
      - LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
- belorn 4y ago
  It seems very unlikely to me that any electric magnetic event could simultaneously destroy modern life while at the same time cause minimum damage to human life. One of the biggest concerns with massive solar storms is that they will cause firestorms in things connected to the power grid. If its not strong enough to do that, then it is unlikely to have the penetrating power to reach all electrical systems.
- LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
  > water is still flowing and drinkable When did you last drink free flowing water from the outside, unfiltered, unboiled, or otherwise untreated? Got a clean spring? Lucky you!
dirtyid 4y ago
How would damage of solar radiation storms scale on modern hardware/infra? Linearly? Exponentially? Logarithmically? Is a storm 100x more powerful that carington even something that can be engineered for. Is it physiologically survivable?
StanislavPetrov 4y ago
Just ordered another wood burning stove.
camkego 4y ago
Exploring briefly with a binomial probability calculator: If there is a 1 in 1000 chance of one of these per year, and you are curious what the odds of this occurring over a 80 year period is, its a little more than 7%. The chance of a 1 in 1000 event (in a year), over 50 years is ~5%. Maybe the preppers are onto something here.
- lettergram 4y ago
  I always find it funny preppers tend to get made fun of for … being loners and preparing for the worst. Seems kinda similar to what many of us do for work (think of the worst case scenario and mitigate the risk), albeit it in the physical realm. As an aside, preppers are often some of the most knowledgeable people where I’m at. They also know the odds of a solar flare and I’ve spoken with them about this very topic before. Perhaps they simply know the risks and what they mean better than we do haha. My neighbor is a prepper, he build his own off grid house, grows his own food, etc. definitely like having him around if I need help any day of the week.
  - adrianN 4y ago
    Preppers get made fun of because the stereotypical prepper is actually not preparing properly against realistic threats and instead prepares against perceived threats at the expense of preparing for plausible scenarios. Your neighbor apparently doesn't fit the stereotype.
    - UweSchmidt 4y ago
      People who are successful in a system count on its continuation (and often won't invest in a few hundred $/€ worth of emergency food, water, heat and light), people who are not successful in a system count it's failure (and do real, or ceremonial 'prepping', telling themselves and others that they will be relatively more successful when the inevitable disaster strikes).
      - lettergram 4y ago
ghastmaster 4y ago
> Our results, published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society A, rule out “solar superflares” as the culprit – but the true cause remains unknown. > For my money, the Sun is still the most likely culprit for Miyake events. At first the two statements above had me perplexed. They seem to contradict each other. Further reading suggests that the author(s) believe the solar superflares would have been visible, yet were not recorded in historical accounts, and so a "solar superflare" could not be the culprit, but it could be a different solar phenomenon. From the source paper (linked in the article) we have these statements: > These ‘Miyake events’ are likely produced by rare increases in cosmic radiation from the Sun or other energetic astrophysical sources. >The wide consensus of the literature is that these events have a solar origin, beginning with Melott & Thomas [43]; Usoskin et al. [44]. For example, the events could represent a solar magnetic collapse, a very brief grand solar minimum, with the reduced heliospheric shielding exposing the Earth to an increase in Galactic cosmic rays > Alternatively, and more popular in the literature, the Miyake events could represent the extreme tail of a distribution of solar flares continuous with those that are observed astrophysically on the modern Sun and other solar-like stars. > Unfortunately, there is fairly limited evidence in written historical accounts for unusual astronomical phenomena coinciding with the radiocarbon spikes. What is the difference between "wide consensus" and "more popular" in the literature?
- DiabloD3 4y ago
  The article opens with 774, which would have coincided with the Charlemagne Event, and was recorded. I imagine if I look into the other dates listed, they also coincide with recorded events.
  - legulere 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/774–775_carbon-14_spike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/774–775_carbon-14_spike > It is known as the Miyake event or the Charlemagne event and it produced the largest and most rapid rise in carbon-14 ever recorded. [...] "This year also appeared in the heavens a red crucifix, after sunset;" [...] The "red crucifix" recorded by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has been variously hypothesised to have been a supernova or the aurora borealis
8bitsrule 4y ago
Biggest solar flare in modern times: [https://soho.nascom.nasa.gov/hotshots/2003_11_04/ https://soho.nascom.nasa.gov/hotshots/2003_11_04/] "19:29 UT on 4 November 2003. This one saturated the X-ray detectors on the NOAA's GOES satellites..." Estimated strength: X28-45. The damages were minimal, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Halloween_solar_storms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Halloween_solar_storms] so it's good to keep this in mind for perspective. The Quebec power outage of 1989 (lasted nine hours) was caused by an X-20 flare.

136 points by sohkamyung 4y ago

sph 4y ago

Massive solar storms are fascinating to me. They seem to be quite common in the scale of "catastrophic disasters", there is a chance it would completely destroy the modern life we are used to, yet compared to other catastrophes, the damage to human life would be minimal. Sure, someone really depends on an electrical gizmo to survive, but most of us would wake up to a world without machines that we rely on daily, yet everything we actually need to survive is intact. There are fruit on trees, water is still flowing and drinkable, boars still roam the forests. It would be like waking up to a very familiar, yet completely alien world for the vast majority of us.

dan_mctree 4y ago
>yet everything we actually need to survive is intact. Unfortunately we now rely on our machines to survive. If they'd suddenly disappear, we'd have a bit of a massive problem. We just wouldn't do very well without our heavy agricultural machines, our food and fuel supply systems, our water pumps, our fertilizer plants, etc. We're not going to feed 7 billion people without machines anymore, so we'd better fix them fast or risk losing a lot of us.
- i386 4y ago
  Sadly being proactive about these issues is not incentivized in our society until something very bad happens. Recent events come to mind.
mjburgess 4y ago
This view always facinates and alarms me. Don't we know that at 7bn people this hasnt been true for millenia? We're talking c. 5,000 apes in a jungle last time this made sense. Don't we know that the earth isnt just provided by god designed for human life? We have been nearly extinct many times, and our labour is required (via, at least, hunting) to make the world habitable for us. Don't we know that nature is a place of choas and extremes, and technology and economics exist primarily to prevent the day-to-day mass death which was common? Don't we know that half of the 100bn who've ever lived died before 20? Don't we know that famine, mass death, mass infant death, mass death in child birth (5-10%), etc. are "the default" ? This strange "nature utopianism" I have always found profoundly pesimissitic and "evil-projecting", since it locates evil in all the solutions to the problems of nature we have struggled to create. If you think "turning off civilisation" will have us wandering around forests, you're about gauarneteed to see what people have done over the last 200k years as evil.
- mach1ne 4y ago
  While hunter-gathering is no Garden of Eden, I don't think it's as bad as you describe for the simple fact that evolution has molded us to it specifically. Earth isn't designed for human life, but human life most certainly is designed for Earth.
  - mjburgess 4y ago
    No, I dont think so. Would you say that to all the extinct species? There's nothing guaranteeing you don't starve. There is no design. Genes are just "random reproductive bets" with fairly high probabilities of failure over the long-run. The environment is basically guaranteed to change faster than your species can evolve, including via meteor. I dont think the rabbits who die alive eaten by foxes, and the foxes which starve from eating all the rabbits regard that cycle as "designed for them". Nor likewise, were the dinosaurs that impressed by the sky going dark. This idea that "we had a home" or "there was once Eden" in any respect is wrong. The life which we were evolved for is one in which if you survived 10, then you might not survive the lion, and if you survive that, not the volcano, and so on. Your body is just a bet made over millions of years, and not one any conservative gambler would take.
    - mach1ne 4y ago
      Extinct species become extinct because there is some change in their environment to which they are not successful at adapting. Generally speaking, neither the human genome or the wilderness of Earth has changed since we built our first huts. You're correct in your regard for exceedingly high child mortality, though it bears no weight on the survival of humanity as a whole in a technology-breaking event. The human body is indeed a bet, and one that has paid off for ~300,000 years and about 12,000 generations, if we start counting from Homo Sapiens. I'd very much take that bet any day.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - wiredfool 4y ago
keewee7 4y ago
>yet everything we actually need to survive is intact. There are fruit on trees, water is still flowing and drinkable, boars still roam the forests This is completely wrong. The natural biomass is not enough to support 7.8 billion people. Without modern industrialized food production the vast majority of people are going to die.
- causi 4y ago
  Yes. Even rolling agricultural technology back a hundred years would require killing off fifty percent of the population.
  - dotancohen 4y ago
    > rolling agricultural technology back a hundred years would require killing off fifty percent of the population. Only 50 years! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice
- _0w8t 4y ago
  [dead]
  - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
    What machines were you planning to plant and harvest that wheat with?
    - _0w8t 4y ago
      Another example is farmers in Belarus during WWII. Often the whole villages together with tools and machinery if it was any were burned down due to heavy fighting. People survived by living in dugouts and planting potato’s by hands. Potato in especially suitable in such situations. It brings more calories per area than even rice while one still can harvest it using basic sticks. While it cannot be stored for years after the harvest as wheat, it still can last for couple of years.
  - 4y ago
pronlover723 4y ago
As someone that once lived without running water for just 5 days because the electric pump to my apartment was broken I can say pretty confidently that that minor experience was enough to make it clear to me, most of us can't survive without "modern life". If there's no electricity there's no running water. That means no more flushing toilets. No more water to drink. If there's no electricity that means no more gas pumps so no trucks to deliver food. No refrigeration to store the food. It also means no communication to coordinate anything. I'm sure I'm only covering the tip of the iceberg. A large percentage of the planet would die from an event like this.
TeMPOraL 4y ago
> Sure, someone really depends on an electrical gizmo to survive, but most of us would wake up to a world without machines that we rely on daily, yet everything we actually need to survive is intact. There are fruit on trees, water is still flowing and drinkable, boars still roam the forests. That would be true for like, 15 minutes. Then the realization hits: we eat it all, and there's no more left until the next growing season or whatever, meanwhile we'll be hungry tomorrow. No. The fate of humanity, were the machines to suddenly stop working, is most of it dead within first couple weeks. Not only the nature cannot support 7 billion humans without technology to make it, not only we're not tooled out for doing agriculture the "old-school" way, but also most people now live in the cities. Cities do not produce food. If you live in a city, and the machines disappear, or the economy collapses, you will starve to death, unless someone kills you first.
- jobs_throwaway 4y ago
  >If you live in a city, and the machines disappear, or the economy collapses, you will starve to death, unless someone kills you first. This is hyperbolic. Plenty of economies have collapsed without everyone starving to death or being murdered. Will it be pretty? No, but not as hopeless as you're making it out to be.
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    > Plenty of economies have collapsed without everyone starving to death or being murdered. Not in the last 50 years, not at the scale I'm talking about. Not to the point food stops being made, stored or transported, and there is no "outside" (such as international aid) to help. Closest to that would be warn-torn zones, where people in fact do starve and die. There's hardly any hyperbole here. With the entire food sector operating just-in-time, at any given moment a modern city has enough food to last a week or two, and that's with refrigeration running. In case of global economic collapse or even global power outage, that's all you'll get in the city. There will be no more food coming after that.
    - LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
belorn 4y ago
It seems very unlikely to me that any electric magnetic event could simultaneously destroy modern life while at the same time cause minimum damage to human life. One of the biggest concerns with massive solar storms is that they will cause firestorms in things connected to the power grid. If its not strong enough to do that, then it is unlikely to have the penetrating power to reach all electrical systems.
LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
> water is still flowing and drinkable When did you last drink free flowing water from the outside, unfiltered, unboiled, or otherwise untreated? Got a clean spring? Lucky you!

dirtyid 4y ago

How would damage of solar radiation storms scale on modern hardware/infra? Linearly? Exponentially? Logarithmically? Is a storm 100x more powerful that carington even something that can be engineered for. Is it physiologically survivable?

StanislavPetrov 4y ago

Just ordered another wood burning stove.

camkego 4y ago

Exploring briefly with a binomial probability calculator: If there is a 1 in 1000 chance of one of these per year, and you are curious what the odds of this occurring over a 80 year period is, its a little more than 7%. The chance of a 1 in 1000 event (in a year), over 50 years is ~5%. Maybe the preppers are onto something here.

lettergram 4y ago
I always find it funny preppers tend to get made fun of for … being loners and preparing for the worst. Seems kinda similar to what many of us do for work (think of the worst case scenario and mitigate the risk), albeit it in the physical realm. As an aside, preppers are often some of the most knowledgeable people where I’m at. They also know the odds of a solar flare and I’ve spoken with them about this very topic before. Perhaps they simply know the risks and what they mean better than we do haha. My neighbor is a prepper, he build his own off grid house, grows his own food, etc. definitely like having him around if I need help any day of the week.
- adrianN 4y ago
  Preppers get made fun of because the stereotypical prepper is actually not preparing properly against realistic threats and instead prepares against perceived threats at the expense of preparing for plausible scenarios. Your neighbor apparently doesn't fit the stereotype.
  - UweSchmidt 4y ago
    People who are successful in a system count on its continuation (and often won't invest in a few hundred $/€ worth of emergency food, water, heat and light), people who are not successful in a system count it's failure (and do real, or ceremonial 'prepping', telling themselves and others that they will be relatively more successful when the inevitable disaster strikes).
    - lettergram 4y ago

ghastmaster 4y ago

> Our results, published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society A, rule out “solar superflares” as the culprit – but the true cause remains unknown. > For my money, the Sun is still the most likely culprit for Miyake events. At first the two statements above had me perplexed. They seem to contradict each other. Further reading suggests that the author(s) believe the solar superflares would have been visible, yet were not recorded in historical accounts, and so a "solar superflare" could not be the culprit, but it could be a different solar phenomenon. From the source paper (linked in the article) we have these statements: > These ‘Miyake events’ are likely produced by rare increases in cosmic radiation from the Sun or other energetic astrophysical sources. >The wide consensus of the literature is that these events have a solar origin, beginning with Melott & Thomas [43]; Usoskin et al. [44]. For example, the events could represent a solar magnetic collapse, a very brief grand solar minimum, with the reduced heliospheric shielding exposing the Earth to an increase in Galactic cosmic rays > Alternatively, and more popular in the literature, the Miyake events could represent the extreme tail of a distribution of solar flares continuous with those that are observed astrophysically on the modern Sun and other solar-like stars. > Unfortunately, there is fairly limited evidence in written historical accounts for unusual astronomical phenomena coinciding with the radiocarbon spikes. What is the difference between "wide consensus" and "more popular" in the literature?

DiabloD3 4y ago
The article opens with 774, which would have coincided with the Charlemagne Event, and was recorded. I imagine if I look into the other dates listed, they also coincide with recorded events.
- legulere 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/774–775_carbon-14_spike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/774–775_carbon-14_spike > It is known as the Miyake event or the Charlemagne event and it produced the largest and most rapid rise in carbon-14 ever recorded. [...] "This year also appeared in the heavens a red crucifix, after sunset;" [...] The "red crucifix" recorded by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has been variously hypothesised to have been a supernova or the aurora borealis

8bitsrule 4y ago

Biggest solar flare in modern times: [https://soho.nascom.nasa.gov/hotshots/2003_11_04/ https://soho.nascom.nasa.gov/hotshots/2003_11_04/] "19:29 UT on 4 November 2003. This one saturated the X-ray detectors on the NOAA's GOES satellites..." Estimated strength: X28-45. The damages were minimal, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Halloween_solar_storms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Halloween_solar_storms] so it's good to keep this in mind for perspective. The Quebec power outage of 1989 (lasted nine hours) was caused by an X-20 flare.