Monday, December 15, 2008
A new sun spells new trouble?
If you need something else to worry about; try this...
This is from an article by Andrei Kislyakov on the Russian News and Information Agency website:
"On August 28, 1859, polar lights glowed and shimmered all over the American continent as darkness fell. Many people thought their city was aflame. The instruments used to record this magnetic fluctuation across the world went off their scales. Telegraph systems malfunctioned, hit by a massive surge in voltage.
This was an actual solar storm. Its results for humankind were small, because civilization had not yet entered a hi-tech phase of development. Had something similar happen in our nuclear space age, destruction would have been catastrophic.
Meanwhile, according to scientific data, storms of such size occur relatively seldom: once in five centuries. But events with half the intensity happen every 50 years. The last one took place on November 13, 1960 and disturbed the Earth's geomagnetic fields, upsetting the operation of radio stations.
Now our dependence on radio electronic devices is so immense that increased solar activity could disable life-support systems all over the world, and not only on the surface."
