An international team of researchers has announced the discovery of the most powerful solar storm in human history. It hit the Earth 14,300 years ago at the end of the last ice age.
Solar storms are rare, but when they occur, they bombard the Earth with huge amounts of high-energy particles, leading to increased production of certain isotopes in the Earth’s atmosphere. The most important of these is radiocarbon (carbon-14). It accumulates in annual rings and ice cores, providing a clear time stamp that allows dating of samples.
In addition, sharp peaks in radiocarbon (so-called Miyake events) also provide invaluable data for scientists studying solar activity and space climate. They provide an accurate dating of the most extreme solar storms.
As of today, scientists know of a number of such leaps caused by major solar storms. These include the events of 994 A.D., 663 B.C., 5259 B.C., and 7176 B.C.. By comparison, Carrington’s famous event in 1859 was of a different kind and was not accompanied by a storm of solar particles.
The spike of A.D. 774 – 775 was considered the strongest until recently. However, while studying wood samples found recently in the French Alps, scientists were able to detect traces of an even more powerful event. It occurred in 12,350 B.C. — during the last ice age.
According to the researchers, the detected radiocarbon peak corresponded to a storm that was 18 percent stronger than the 774 to 775 AD storm and 500 times stronger than the 2005 storm: the largest such event of the satellite era.
It is currently the first extreme event identified by scientists that occurred outside of the Holocene Epoch — the last 12,000 years of stable warm climate in which human civilization evolved. The discovery plays an important role in understanding the processes occurring on the Sun, as well as greatly enhancing the ability to analyze radiocarbon data even for glacial climates.
Earlier we reported on how a powerful solar flare caused communication outages on Earth.
According to Phys.org
