774 AD | THE WAVE | Current Reset - Philipp Druzhinin Interview with Adriano Fiorelli | Biggest Storm in 10,000 years
WHAT WAVE?
Some say our planet began the 9th Wave in 2011.
A very strong wave warning in 2020-21: There are extra energy waves coming to
humanity that are empowering the manifestation of our thoughts along with
everyone else’s thoughts. Whatever you think about will happen much faster
than normal. Whatever they think about will happen just as it does for you. So
pay close attention.
In the year 774 AD, an enormously powerful blast of matter and energy
from space slammed into Earth. Nothing like it had been felt on this planet for
10,000 years (that’s their theory anyway). A mix of high-energy light and hugely
accelerated subatomic particles, so when this WAVE impacted Earth, it changed
our atmospheric chemistry enough to be measured centuries later. Scientists
think the 774 Flare may have been a special circumstance, where a powerful
solar flare occurred near a streamer of gas called a filament, slamming it and
accelerating the protons in it to such high energies.
https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/a-huge-solar-filament-erupts-into-space
On August 31, 2012, the Sun threw a major tantrum. It started with a vast arc of material towering over its surface, a stream of plasma flowing between two sunspots. Sometimes these collapse back down to the Sun's surface, but this one exploded, blasting hundreds of millions of tons of material out into space.
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Sun storms pinpoint Europeans being in Canada in 1021 A.D.(?)
New research pinpoints an exact date Vikings from Europe were in North America: 1021 A.D. (one millennium ago this year), 430 years before Christopher Columbus was even born.
How was this determination possible? Because the Sun erupted in an immense series of storms that altered Earth's atmosphere, leaving measurable changes in tree rings at the time.
In the 1960s, archaeologists discovered a Norse Viking site in L'Anse aux Meadows, in the northern tip of Newfoundland. By looking at the styles of the remains there as well as examining Icelandic sagas (oral stories told over generations, and not written down until centuries later), they were able to get a rough date of the site of around 1000 A.D. But this is a relative date, found by comparing events at different times (so, say, they could tell it was after some other event, but not exactly how long after).
This is where the Sun comes in. In the years 774 and 993 the Sun blasted out some truly epic explosions called solar storms, most likely in the form of solar flares. These are spectacular events that occur when the Sun's magnetic field lines get tangled up and suddenly short circuit, releasing their stored-up energy. This can easily equal hundreds of millions of times the energy released in a one-megaton nuke — the 774 A.D. event was the biggest in 10,000 years and was strong enough to power all human energy use for 300,000 years!
These flares send out huge waves of subatomic particles into space. When they slam into Earth's atmosphere they can generate aurorae and power outages, but they also create isotopes of certain atoms — for example, the majority of carbon on Earth has six protons and six neutrons in the atomic nucleus (called carbon-12), but a flare can increase the amount of the isotope carbon-14, which has 8 neutrons. The relative amounts of these isotopes can be measured in the lab; tree rings around the world were seen to have elevated amounts in both 774 and 993 A.D. (by 12 and 9%, respectively), and in fact those solar storms were first discovered by examining tree rings.
As you may know, a tree grows one ring per year, allowing the tree's age to be measured (this science is called dendrochronology). It can also be used to determine when the tree was felled, if the outer bark edge is still intact — somewhat amusingly, this is called the waney edge.
A team of scientists looked at wood found at the L'Anse aux Meadows Viking site. In three cases the trees had been physically cut down, and moreover, they were clearly cut with metal tools — Vikings had metal implements at the time, but indigenous people did not. The wood was all from different trees (one was fir, and another juniper, for example). The key parts here are that the wood was all from trees that had been alive for many decades, and all had their waney edge intact as well.
The scientists extracted 127 samples from the wood, and 83 rings were examined. They used two methods to secure dates. The first was to compare the amount of carbon-14 in each ring with known atmospheric amounts from the time. This gives a rough date for the waney edge of the wood. They also then looked for an anomalous spike in carbon-14 in an inner ring, knowing this would have come from the 993 A.D. event, and then simply counted the rings outward from there to get the date of the waney edge.
In all three samples the waney edge was dated to the same year: 1021 A.D. This would be incredibly unlikely to occur at random.
This means that Vikings were definitely in North America, specifically Newfoundland, Canada, more than four and a half centuries before Columbus. And mind you this may not have been the first visit, just the first we have evidence for. So Vikings were there in 1021 A.D. at the latest.
In fact, looking at different kinds of cells in the wood the scientists could tell one tree was felled in the spring of that year, while another was in the summer/autumn, indicating the Vikings were there for several months.
This is historically very interesting, especially since it's still erroneously taught in American schools that Columbus discovered America. That's ridiculous on its face, since he and his crew met indigenous natives*, and it's known the Vikings were in Canada long before. But now, with this new work, we know exactly when they were there.
There's a lot of scientific value to this as well. The sagas tell of Vikings peacefully meeting indigenous people in America, and there was likely an exchange of flora and fauna. They may have swapped pathogens, too, which is common in such events, and makes for interesting epidemiology. There may also have been some, ah, genetic material exchanges as well, though testing of the population in Norse Greenland doesn't show evidence of it. That doesn't preclude it, though, and knowing humans it does seem like something like that may have happened. I'd bet that way.
I've said many times that science is a tapestry. In this case the metaphor is strong: It took the wildly different fields of solar astronomy and magnetism, cosmochemistry, dendrochronology, and archaeology all woven together to examine the evidence that led to understanding when exactly Europeans visited North America.
Science! I love this stuff.
*Also, he is presented as some sort of noble explorer who proved the Earth was round. This is grossly wrong. The Earth had been known to be round for at least 1700 years before Columbus, and in fact he thought the Earth was far smaller than already known; he expected the trip to be short and packed provisions accordingly. If he hadn't stumbled on the Bahamas by accident his crew might've starved due to his error. Also, his stature of "noble" is, um, highly arguable.
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In 774 AD, the Sun blasted Earth with the biggest storm in 10,000 years
In the year 774 AD, an enormously powerful blast of matter and energy from space slammed into Earth.
Nothing like it had been felt on this planet for 10,000 years. A mix of high-energy light and hugely accelerated subatomic particles, when this wave impacted Earth it changed our atmospheric chemistry enough to be measured centuries later.
Our pre-electronic societies went entirely unaffected by it. But were this sort of event to happen today, the results would be bad.
It was first discovered by an analysis of tree rings, of all things. Scientists found that the level of carbon-14, an isotope of carbon, was much higher in rings from that year than usual. Some years later, looking at air samples from ice cores, scientists saw that there were elevated levels of beryllium-10 and chlorine-36 as well.
The common factor in all these elements is that they are created when extremely high-energy subatomic particles hit Earth's air and ground. They slam into the nuclei of atoms and change them, creating these isotopes. The only way to get particles at energies like this is from space, where powerful magnetic fields in exploding stars, for example, can accelerate the particles to such high speeds. We call these isotopes cosmogenic, made from space.
What could have created the space storm in 774 AD? The obvious candidate for such a thing is a very powerful solar flare, an explosion on the Sun created when intense magnetic field lines tangle up and short circuit, releasing huge blasts of energy and particles. But the 774 event was so powerful that at first scientists were skeptical it could be from a flare. Once any other type of astronomical phenomenon was ruled out, though, a flare was all that was left.
A team of scientists has gone through the records to look at other such events in the hopes of categorizing this flare compared to other known flares. What they found is that this event was by far more powerful than even some relatively scary modern flares.
For example, in 1989 the Sun erupted in a powerful series of flares as well as a huge coronal mass ejection (or CME), where billions of tons of hydrogen plasma is ejected at high speed. Carrying its own magnetic field, this bout of space weather slammed into the Earth's magnetic field, affecting it so profoundly that electric currents were induced under the Earth's surface. Called geomagnetically induced currents, this extra electric energy blew out transformers in Quebec and caused a power outage that lasted for hours.
In February 1956 was the most powerful solar storm in the modern era, which was easily twice as strong as the 1989 event. Our power grid wasn't as heavily used at that time, so it didn't cause the same sort of damage as the 1989 event, but was still a huge event.
Using various methods to characterize the 1956 storm, including measurements in visible light, radio waves, changes to the Earth's ionosphere (a high-altitude layer of ionized air that, when it changes rapidly, can affect magnetometers on the ground that measure magnetic field strength), and more, they found the 774 AD event was a staggering 30 to 70 times stronger. This means it was likely 100 times stronger than the one in 1989.
It's not clear how long the flare lasted; most strong ones grow and decay in a matter of hours. But the total energy released in this flare was about the same as what the entire Sun radiates in one second: 2 x 1026 Joules, or the equivalent of roughly 100 billion one-megaton bombs going off.
That's a lot of energy. Enough to power our entire planet (given our current energy use) for 300,000 years.
Yegads.
A flare like this is called a superflare, and until now it wasn't thought the Sun could produce them (other stars that are more active magnetically make them quite often). The scientists think the 774 flare may have been a special circumstance, where a powerful flare occurred near a streamer of gas called a filament, slamming it and accelerating the protons in it to such high energies.
That's actually something of a relief! I'd prefer that it's hard for the Sun to do this.
Such an event happening today would be catastrophic. It could take out numerous satellites — the particles and high-energy radiation can short out even hardened electronics — and cause widespread blackouts. Those could take a long time to fix, since the bigger transformers used by power grids cannot be mass-produced. Some scientists calculated that passengers on international airplane flights could receive a lifetime dose of radiation in a few hours from such an event.
The effects on Earth can be difficult to determine; in part it depends on the whether the flare and CME's magnetic polarity (the north-south part of the magnetic field) is able to couple with the Earth's magnetic polarity. If it does we get the blackouts and other damage. But some of the effects occur either way.
I'll note that we haven't seen as powerful an event since 774, though many have been quite strong. The Sun erupted in 2012 in a coronal mass ejection that, had it hit the Earth, would've been worse than the 1989 event. Happily it was sent off in another direction.
But it's clear the Sun can have some pretty big tantrums, and we need to take this seriously. Certainly solar astronomers do, and as the Sun ramps up into the newest magnetic cycle they're looking at our star with everything they have. We don't know how strong this cycle will be; one prediction is that it will be no big deal, but another says it very much will be.
We'll see. There's clearly a lot more we have to learn about the Sun. It's not an exaggeration to say that our modern lives depend on it.
SOURCE: https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/in-774-ad-the-sun-blasted-earth-with-the-biggest-storm-in-10000-years
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