SOLAR INDIGESTION
Being of Lebanese descent and therefore somewhat dark-skinned, I’ve always had a rather arrogant attitude toward the Sun—problems associated with it were what white folks had to worry about. So I couldn’t be bothered at first, when Roger Remy, our company’s principal scientist and founder, announced that the Sun was “making mayonnaise,” which in his idiosyncratic vernacular means “having a breakdown.” Roger is kind of a French Moroccan Indiana Jones gone-to-seed, who talks a lot about covert operations, known as “skunk projects,” and space travel. But his specialty is the manipulation of plasmas, intensely hot ionized gases, of which the Sun is an immense ball, so I couldn’t just dismiss his statement outright.
Whatever the Sun’s problems, they were 93 million miles away, unlike Christmas, which at the time, November 2004, was bearing down like a freight train. So with two young children, an exhausted wife, and overbooked holiday travel plans, I let the matter drop.
“The Sun can’t get sick, you silly,” said my four-year-old daughter, Phoebe, who must have overheard a conversation. I was happy to agree.
On the day after Christmas, a close family friend died of an overdose of narcotics and antidepressants. The overdose was intentional, but the resulting suicide apparently was not. That day, December 26, 2004, was also the day the tsunami struck the Indian Ocean. In the week that followed, my wife grew more distraught over the death of her friend, a young woman of eighteen whom my wife had known since the girl’s infancy, while I became preoccupied with the aftermath of the tsunami. I am sorry to say that neither of us had much compassion for the other’s grief. The photo I will never forget, on the front page of the New York Times, was of a dozen or so people on a beautiful beach—Phuket, Thailand, as I recall—watching the unimaginable wave bear down on them. They looked so defenseless in their skimpy bathing suits. A few were running, but most were just slackjaw transfixed. All died, most likely. Why I felt more for a few figures in a photograph than my wife’s young friend, and why my wife felt more for the loss of one troubled teenager than 250,000 people in eleven nations, cannot be explained, except that we’re different.
Although the connection between the behavior of the Sun and the Indian Ocean tsunami is debatable, the sheer magnitude of that disaster, so out of the blue, made checking out Roger’s mayonnaise hypothesis seem the prudent thing to do. So after the holidays I looked into the matter and, sure enough, the Sun seemed like it had eaten some bad mayonnaise. It was mottled with sunspots, which are larger-than-Earth magnetic storms that can unleash as much energy as 10 billion hydrogen bombs, according to Tony Phillips, editor of the excellent Web site science.nasa.gov. The sunspots were belching billion-ton proton blasts and trillion-volt electron skewers all around the Solar System. Very dramatic, but isn’t this how the Sun normally conducts itself?
Not really. Ever since Galileo invented the telescope in 1610, solar activity has been observed to follow cycles of roughly eleven years, activity being judged by the number of sunspots popping up. When I started my research in January 2005, the sunspot cycle was, by scientific consensus, approaching the solar minimum, that is, the period of lowest solar activity, which bottomed out in 2006. Instead, for some unknown reason, the Sun has been throwing a tantrum ever since Halloween 2003, when the largest radiation storms ever recorded pounded the Solar System. Thank goodness most of the Halloween outbursts happened to miss the Earth; they were about twice as strong as the March 1989 solar radiation storm that popped the Hydro-Quebec power grid, blacking out the households of 6 million unsuspecting Canadians. Solar activity remained abnormally high and spiked with the giant sunspots of January 20, 2005, which pelted the Earth’s atmosphere with its largest proton storm in fifteen years. What made this all the more astonishing is that it occurred at or near solar minimum, the point in the eleven-year sunspot cycle where there is supposed to be little or no solar activity. Chilling, but not nearly as chilling as September, when the Sun went from perfectly calm, not a blemish, to being covered with sunspots and spitting out record-setting mouthfuls of radiation, right at the height of the hurricane season that produced Katrina, Rita, Wilma, and so many others.
There is nothing in the human experience, including the sacred concept of Almighty God, as reliable as the Sun. The Sun empowers Earthly life. It warms the land and the oceans, begets all plant and animal growth, energizes the atmosphere, helps generate clouds, drives the wind and the ocean currents, and cycles the planet’s water supply. The notion, therefore, that the Sun may somehow be changing in any way is the very definition of unthinkable—far beyond the leap required, for example, to grasp the consequences of all-out nuclear holocaust, as Herman Kahn and other doomsday philosophers were once wont to do.
An increase of as little as 0.5 percent in the Sun’s energy output would be enough to fry the satellite system on which global telecommunications, military security, and banking depend. Ditto our skin, with spikes in cancer and other radiation diseases. Runaway global warming, and the attendant upsurge in sea levels and flooding, megastorm activity, and even seismic and volcanic holocausts, would seem inevitable.
Having reported on science and nature for more than twenty years, I expected roadblocks in researching this bizarre solar behavior. Famous institutions would naturally be loath to associate their names with such a potentially devastating subject as the changing Sun, for the very good reason that their stamp of authority might cause panic in certain quarters. So I was taken aback to find that the Max Planck Institute, Germany’s equivalent of MIT and CalTech, has conducted a number of studies confirming that the Sun hasn’t been this turbulent for 11,000 years at least. Ever since the 1940s, and in particular since 2003, solar activity levels have been off the charts. We could be zapped at any moment.
COLLATERAL DAMAGE
Maybe the most frightening apocalypse scenario of all is what’s happening in space. Talk about change being unthinkable. I mean, besides a few asteroids here and there, space is just there, right? It doesn’t change. Well, the whole Solar System is becoming increasingly agitated because we are moving into an interstellar energy cloud, according to an emerging Russian school of planetary geophysics. These scientists, who base their findings on decades of analyzing satellite data, have found that all the planets’ atmospheres, including the Earth’s, are beginning to show the effects of this massive input, both directly from the energy cloud and indirectly from the disturbances being created within the Sun from its encounter with the energy cloud.
Not to worry. The Earth’s atmosphere will protect us, right? Maybe in the old days it would have, but now Harvard and NASA scientists are reporting that California-sized cracks have inexplicably opened up in the Earth’s magnetic field, our essential shield against solar radiation and the deadly cancers and climatic disturbances that come with it. Some scientists are even predicting that a pole reversal, in which the North and South magnetic poles switch places, is imminent. That’s a several-thousand-year process in which multiple magnetic pole sites pop up around the globe, confusing and sometimes extinguishing the thousands of species of birds, fish, and mammals that depend upon magnetism for their sense of direction. During the confusion, the Earth’s magnetic protection drops to near zero, the cosmic equivalent of a very pale person getting caught on a beach in Miami with no hat, no shade, no sunblock, and an imperfect ass in a teeny Speedo.
One source of protection from excess solar radiation comes from another way the world might end. The sky could fill up with ray-absorbent ash, but that’s about the only good news I could find in a BBC documentary reporting that Yellowstone, probably the largest supervolcano in the world, is preparing to erupt. The last time Yellowstone erupted, 600,000 years ago, it vomited enough dust to cover the North American continent several feet deep. Today such an eruption would lead to a nuclear-winter-type scenario that would savage global agriculture and economy, killing hundreds of millions.
And the biggest reason to worry about the end of life is the prediction in Nature, perhaps the world’s most respected science journal, that at least three-quarters of the Earth’s species are wiped