From the Los Angeles Times to The New York Times, sources across the news spectrum have documented a recent rise in solar flares right on schedule with scientists’ predictions.
“The ferocity and pace of the Sun’s flares and magnetic eruptions rise and fall on an 11-year cycle, and the Sun has only recently emerged from its slumber and started generating new solar flares,” Kenneth Chang wrote in The New York Times in March.
This past July 12, an X-class coronal mass projection—the strongest of the C, M and X solar-storm categories—erupted from the sun’s surface, prompting heliophysicists like Alex Young of Maryland’s Goddard Space Flight Center to increase monitoring and alert government leaders of potential consequences. He says the ejections hurl violent plasma clouds toward Earth that have been known to cause radio blackouts, and in extreme cases disrupt entire power grids.
Speaking to the same dangers, Mike Hapgood, a space weather scientist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, England, told the L.A. Times, “Think of it like a hurricane—is it headed toward us or not headed toward us? If we’re lucky, it misses us.”
While acknowledging the well-documented damage solar flares are known to cause, other scientists like biophysicist Dieter Broers have proposed that the increased activity could also precipitate positive effects.
Broers, biophysics director at the International Council for Scientific Development (whose membership has included over 100 Nobel Prize winners), has for decades been studying the effect of electromagnetic fields on biological systems. In his forthcoming book, Solar Revolution: Why Mankind Is on the Cusp of an Evolutionary Leap, he chronicles research from a number of scientific disciplines showing a correlation between increased solar activity and advances in humans’ mental faculties.
As Earth’s electromagnetic fields shift—the fields that govern terrestrial biological phenomena like animal migration patterns—so too will humanity’s path forward, he says. Unlike many doomsayers, however, Broers predicts the net effects of geomagnetic disturbance will ultimately prove positive. Grounding his predictions in a history of scientific observation, he maps out the possibilities that will soon come to light by the rays of the sun itself.
NASA predicts solar activity will reach a peak in 2013, an event it calls “Solar Max,” detailed in the video below. To track the latest news in solar storms, coronal mass ejections, and other heliocentric developments, visit NASA’s Sun-Earth page.
Featured image By NASA [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
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