New research reveals the strongest solar event ever detected, in 12350 BC
83 comments
·May 15, 2025ggm
This would not have been kind to any RF/EMF systems, be they GEO, LEO or terrestrial.
We'd have been walking around marvelling at st elmo's fire coming off any point-contact junction between metal or exposed metal structure, with the most fantastic skies at night.
On the other hand, would allergy sufferers be marvelling at the removal of all the dust and pollen? This would be like the outdoors becoming a giant anti-static dust remover.
Primitive man wakes up, discovers can breathe through both nostrils...
brookst
Damn, you took me from “hope that doesn’t happen again in my lifetime” to “oh Jesus please let that happen tomorrow” in just a few words.
hattar
I spent my whole life only breathing through half a nostril on a good day. About 10 years ago I got surgery and Sublingual Immunotherapy drops, and the results have been life changing.
I sleep better, my mind is clearer, I feel like an entirely new person. I am not exaggerating when I say that I still occasionally think about how nice it is to be able to breathe clearly.
greggsy
Flonase (fluticasone) has been a life changer. I have taken for granted how valuable breathing is in terms of speech, let alone sleep and general fatigue.
coenhyde
Oxygen is a hell of a drug.
I use nose strips, and I'm addicted now too.
darkwater
I was recently on cortisone for 3 months due to another condition and whoa I didn't remember how cool life was without a perpetual running nose.
greggsy
I recall reading about some link between respiratory effectiveness and human development.
No idea how valid that research might have been. In retrospect, it almost borders on phrenology.
roygbiv2
How would this effect computers and everyday electrical devices? If we detected something like this heading towards us would we have to turn everything off for the day/week? That's just not possible though is it, can't just turn off nuclear power plants for the day.
cyberax
There won't be any effect.
Solar flares do NOT affect the devices on the ground. All the fast-moving charged particles are completely absorbed in the upper atmosphere. And to give you some perspective, the most energetic flares can produce 10^-3 W/m^2 flux at the Earth's orbit.
The flares do affect the geomagnetic field. And a changing magnetic field induces current, but it becomes non-negligible only for very long conductors. So long-distance power transmission lines might suddenly become biased with a persistent DC voltage, and some long optical cables might start experiencing over/undervoltage problems with amplifiers.
But locally? You won't see anything unusual.
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7
> But locally? You won't see anything unusual.
Not necessarily?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-event_upset
Some Miyake events are also thought have lasted a year or longer. I think there could be a very bad time if an event like this lasted a year?
shakna
They won't affect your phone or laptop, but transformers along the longer ranges of the grid are unprotected.
An X-class flare won't do anything. But in the size of the article? Localised temporary blackouts would be entirely unsurprising.
roygbiv2
Well there you go then, a little dull but probably for the best.
jiggawatts
The panic about these is way out of proportion with the real risks. Modern systems have all sorts of over-voltage protection, and we no longer use "telegraph wires" directly connected to vulnerable electronics like speakers and amplifiers.
All modern telecommunications are over fibre or radio links.
JumpCrisscross
> would allergy sufferers be marvelling at the removal of all the dust and pollen? This would be like the outdoors becoming a giant anti-static dust remover
How do solar flares render pollen groundborne?
ggm
How did research on the solar event find a layer deposited in what is undoubtedly surface not upper atmosphere?
JumpCrisscross
> How did research on the solar event find a layer deposited in what is undoubtedly surface not upper atmosphere?
FTFA: "Solar particle storms can greatly enhance the normal production of cosmogenic isotopes like radiocarbon (14C) in the atmosphere by galactic cosmic rays. Such enhanced production, preserved in annual tree rings, serves as a clear cosmic timestamp making possible absolute dating of tree samples."
konart
>Primitive man wakes up, discovers can breathe through both nostrils...
Not exactly both though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasal_cycle
TimByte
Nature's way of saying sorry for the EMP apocalypse
cyberax
You're overestimating the effects. They would have been imperceptible on the ground, except for the stunning aurorae.
Mistletoe
I feel like primitive man had no problems breathing through both nostrils anyway.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/allergies-are-common...
ajuc
The ones that had - died as small kids.
JoeDaDude
Is this not one of the Miyake Events[1]? This particular one was reported in 2023 [2].
[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miyake_event
[2]. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02624...
zamadatix
The article notes it is. The article seems to focus on the new discovery of just how strong the particular event seems to have been compared to the others, not the initial discovery of the event itself.
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7
New as in research from 2023?
https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S02624079230189...
zeristor
If this is C14 then this requires biological matter. Carbon dating depends on C14 so I’d assume that this needs to be tied to a chain of tree ring dates going back to tie these events down.
There’s no doubt evidence of stronger events further back, it would be interesting to see if theirs a loose record of suggested intensities for those.
I take it most of these details will be in the happy which I’ll need to study.
__MatrixMan__
I hope it doesn't take so long to happen again that we have nobody around who remembers how to fix what it breaks. If so it'll be back to the stone ages for humanity.
alex-robbins
You think that the farther in the future you go, the less likely it is that any existing population will know how to fix what breaks? That strikes me as oddly pessimistic, and frankly unlikely.
monster_truck
I wouldn't be so sure, it's wildly common. Reverse engineering products to figure out how to make them again is its own sub-industry in every manufacturing field, especially anything tool & die.
There's an enormous chasm between when companies started mass producing things and the digitization of blueprints. More often than not it isn't even the original company, it's one of their customer's customers 50+ years after they went out of business.
zwnow
Well big tech wants to replace all the white collar jobs with their bullshit ChatGPT wrappers, so it wouldn't be surprising if actual skill vanishes.
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7
Isn't that a bit pessimistic? Assuming machine natural language understanding and general reasoning improves dramatically (which seems possible, based on recent history), it is likely that (given that we still have the data) at some point in the future anyone will have the ability to acquire these skills, or that machine agents will be skilled enough to guide human or other types of agents to do things.
zwnow
Yea billions of dead people. What a thing to hope for.
TheBlight
Doesn't that roughly coincide with the Younger Dryas?
kuprel
This was my first thought. It seems this solar event happened over 1000 years before Younger Dryas
mensetmanusman
Yes, such a fun topic…
null
decimalenough
The article casually mentions a "notorious" 775 AD event which I'd never heard about (insert relevant XKCD here), so here's Wikipedia:
The event of 774 had no significant consequences for life on Earth, but had it happened in modern times, it might have produced catastrophic damage to modern technology, particularly to communication and space-borne navigation systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/774%E2%80%93775_carbon-14_spik...
Interestingly, the identification of the cause of the 775 AD event with a huge solar flare came from the same researchers as this story.
bee_rider
Not a single telegraph wire was operational, in the wake of the 775 AD event.
wpnx
I’m curious what humans at the time would have felt, if anything.
dhosek
Looking up the 775 solar storm, it appears mostly to have been experienced as northern lights coming much further south than normally experienced.
ed_mercer
a less extreme version of radiation poisoning?
badmonster
wow that's cool. Given that the 12350 BC event was over 500 times more intense than the 2005 solar storm, what are the possible consequences if a storm of similar magnitude were to occur today?
(pdf) https://oulurepo.oulu.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/55447/nbnfio...