By Patrick J. Kiger, Discovery News
This year,
our sun enters the start of the “solar maximum,” the
point in the star’s 11-year cycle of activity when sunspots
and solar flares are at their most frequent and intense, buffeting
the Earth with radiation that can disrupt everything from pigeons’
sense of direction to the functioning of telecommunications satellites
and power grids. The cycle may be hitting its peak right now,
with the heightened possibility of severe solar disruptions lasting
until 2005.
Solar storms,
of course, are nothing new; the brilliant colors they create in
the night horizon once sent Roman soldiers rushing to a town they
thought was on fire. But what in ancient times was a puzzling
curiosity has become an increasingly serious problem in a modern
world where silicon circuitry, portable phones and AC outlets
have replaced bread as the staff of life. A 1996 panel of National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists predicted that
the millennial solar maximum won’t match the tumultuous solar
weather of 1958, when more than 200 sunspots were recorded. But
the peak of cycle 23, will likely be one of the two or three most
intense to take place in the last 130 years.
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