Tree Rings Reveal Biggest Solar Storm Ever

Scientists have found evidence of the largest solar storm known to date, one of such power that it would devastate life as we know it if we were to feel the effects today, per the BBC. The team analyzed slices of ancient trees undergoing the fossilization process on the eroded banks of the Drouzet River in the southern French Alps, finding a massive spike in radiocarbon levels 14,300 years ago. The researchers, who compared the radiocarbon levels to measurements of beryllium in ice cores from Greenland, which also provide a record of solar activity, claim the spike was caused by the largest known solar storm, which would've sent massive volumes of energetic particles into the atmosphere, per a release.

Though "radiocarbon is constantly being produced in the upper atmosphere through a chain of reactions initiated by cosmic rays," scientists recently "found that extreme solar events including solar flares and coronal mass ejections can also create short-term bursts of energetic particles which are preserved as huge spikes in radiocarbon production occurring over the course of just a single year," explains Edouard Bard of the European Centre for Research and Teaching in Environmental Geosciences. He is lead author of the study published Monday in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences.

Study co-author Tim Heaton of the University of Leeds says it's important to understand such events and what might cause them because if a similar storm were to strike today, it "could permanently damage the transformers in our electricity grids, resulting in huge and widespread blackouts lasting months," per the Independent. "They could also result in permanent damage to the satellites that we all rely on for navigation and telecommunication, leaving them unusable" and "create severe radiation risks to astronauts." This is the ninth extreme solar storm, or Miayake Event, to be identified within the last 15,000 years, per the release. The most recent one, occurring in the year 774, was half as powerful as the one described in this study. (More solar storm stories.)