World's oldest trees reveal biggest solar storm in history

Sun storm

While humanity faces many problems on Earth - wars, political instability, ongoing pandemics, all along with energy, climate and water crises - it is important to Remember that the universe is always in motion.

Japanese cedar trees can live to be thousands of years old and store history.

While earthquakes, tornadoes, volcanoes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters aren't quite over in the meantime, there's a potential threat for which we're completely unprepared: a solar storm. God.

Without any mitigation measures, widespread electrical fires and power station failures could lead to trillions of dollars in damage, affecting the lives of billions of people around the Earth.

Historically, the largest recorded solar storm event occurred in 1859: the Carrington event. But more than a millennium earlier, an even more powerful cosmic event occurred on Earth. We know this because, over the years 774-775, there was a spike in the presence of carbon-14 in the Earth's atmosphere, and evidence was found in the rings of trees. all over the world.

After a decade of investigating the possible causes of this spike, it was concluded that the Sun was to blame. A solar storm from more than 1200 years ago could be the most powerful storm ever recorded in natural history.

A flash of light from the Sun, launching matter into the Solar System, can trigger events such as coronal mass ejections.

Plants typically grow from the inside out, creating a new set of rings in their trunks with each passing year. In particular, the last 3000 years have been exceptionally documented thanks to a landmark dataset compiled from tree-ring data spanning the globe.

Carbon is one of the most important elements found in all organic matter, either from the atmosphere (for most plants) or from matter of carbon origin (which is found in most plants). animals) consumed for food. Carbon is of three types: carbon-12 (which makes up the majority of carbon in nature), carbon-13 (represents about 1.1% of natural carbon) and carbon-14 (a radioactive substance, with a half-life of about 1.1% of natural carbon) 5700 years).

If the only source of carbon were the material that the Earth originally formed about 4.5 billion years ago, there would be no carbon-14, because they would have all decomposed. But there is carbon-14 on Earth, and until the 20th century we didn't figure out why: because the Earth was constantly bombarded with high-energy particles from space.

A typical relativistic solar event.

From all sorts of cosmic sources - stars (including the Sun), white dwarfs, neutron stars, black holes, and even galaxies beyond the Milky Way - high-energy particles are emitted, and some of them collide with Earth's atmosphere.

Neutrons, when it comes to carbon-14, are all that matters. Much of Earth's atmosphere (78%) is made up of nitrogen gas: a diatomic molecule containing two nitrogen atoms each.

From creation to decomposition, each carbon-14 atom will behave like its stable cousins ​​carbon-12 and carbon-13. It readily forms carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, and is mixed in the atmosphere and oceans. It is incorporated into all living organisms exactly like any other form of carbon, until a concentration in equilibrium with the surrounding environment is reached.

Only when an organism dies - or, in the case of organisms like trees, its annual/seasonal rings are fully formed - no new carbon-14 can enter it. At that point, the amount of carbon-14 inside it is at its maximum, and from here on it will decompose as expected: exponentially and probabilistically, with an overall half-life of about 5700 years. .

"The Red Cross in the Sky"

That's why the measurement of tree rings - and in particular, the measurement of tree rings in Japanese cedars living in the years 774-775 - caused such a scientific shock when analyzing them. In the past 3,000 years, there have only been four brief periods in which the carbon-14 content of trees increased by more than 3% in the span of a decade.

Many trees, found around the world, are thousands of years old.

One of them is recent: in the 20th century, it was caused by the explosion of the world's first nuclear weapon.

Two of them are of relatively low magnitude and therefore not the best for analysis.

But such a transition happened suddenly and with tremendous intensity. Between 774 and 775, the carbon-14 content increased by a staggering 12%, and all at once.

This 'spike' was about 20 times larger than any other natural variation found to occur at annual intervals and was quickly confirmed to exist in other parts of the world. Other trees from around the world, including in Germany, Russia, New Zealand, and even North America also showed similar spikes, suggesting that the carbon-14 spike is a phenomenon across the world. all over the world.

But when you add them all together, a solar event is the only logical conclusion.

Cosmic rays, which are extremely high-energy particles originating from all over the universe, including the Sun, strike atomic nuclei in the upper atmosphere and create new showers of particles. .

Historically, a 'red cross in the sky' was recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of 774, possibly referring to a supernova (although no ruins have been found) or a aurora event.

Around exactly the same time, in 775, Chinese observers reported seeing an anomalous "thunderstorm", widely suspected to be a reference to an aurorae event at the equator, as No such "thunder" had ever been reported before.

Meanwhile, scientific tree-ring data can be combined with ice core data recovered from Antarctica. While the tree belts showed a carbon-14 spike from 774 to 775, the ice core data showed a corresponding spike in beryllium-10 and chlorine-36 radioactivity, suggesting an association with the powerful event, the energy of solar particles,

Two other spikes recorded over the past 3000 years also correspond to potential solar activity events: one from 993 to 994, and one from about 660 BC.

All three of these events can be united by a common cause: the rapid ejection of protons from the Sun. Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae don't produce enough protons, so those explanations are disputed.

Events that are not optically visible, such as extragalactic cosmic flares or the jet of a black hole, would not produce coincidental historical observations, and so those events would also be rejected. . The only option that explains all the observations together is a solar storm.

In February 2021, an estimated 4.4 million Texans lost power due to a winter storm.

While the Carrington event was the most powerful solar flare ever recorded in modern times, a complete analysis of the data suggests that this 774-775 event, from more than 1200 years ago, could have been more powerful or even more than 10 times.

Although the data is much worse, new evidence has just been released this year that suggests a solar storm from about 9200 years ago could be even more powerful than the 774-775 event.

Unless we prepare our electrical grids, energy distribution systems, space infrastructure and citizens on Earth for the inevitable day when such a fire strikes. humanity, the planet will pay a dire price at the same time. Otherwise, when a solar storm hits, our only way out will be to pick up the pieces of the remaining civilization and, if possible, we'll try to rebuild.