JUST WHAT WE NEED - SUN'S POLES WILL FLIP IN FOUR MONTHS - BAD WEATHER AHEAD

DAILY MAIL - The sun's magnetic field reverses its polarity every eleven years or so.  Bursts of energy will be  released leading to space storms and climate extremes and radio disruptions on Earth.  It's called the Solar Maximum. 

 

‘It looks like we're no more than three to four months away from a complete field reversal,’ solar physicist Dr Todd Hoeksema of Stanford University told Nasa Science.  ‘This change will have ripple effects throughout the solar system.’

 

In 1859 a solar storm known as the 1859 Solar Superstorm, or Carrington Event after Richard C Carrington who recorded the event, saw numerous solar flares appear all over Earth.  It was so strong that the Northern Lights - a natural light display that appears predominantly in that Arctic and Antarctic regions and is caused by the collision of energetic charged particles in the magnetosphere and solar wind - were said to be have been visible as far south as Rome.

 
Read more and see pictures - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2385401/A-storm-coming-Suns-magnetic-field-set-FLIP-lead-bad-weather-radio-disruption.html

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The sun is acting strangely.  Same thing happened during the Little Ice Age, between 1645 and 1715. 

RUSSIA TODAY - The current solar activity cycle, possibly the weakest in 100 years, is approaching its maximum. This may signal a future low period for the sun, probably not unlike the one that caused the so-called Little Ice Age from the mid-16th to mid-19th centuries.

  

One indicator of the upcoming change is the reduction of solar magnetic activity. Every cycle peak the sun’s magnetic field flips polarity due to reorganization of its inner dynamo.

 

Possible explanations for the sun’s latest odd behavior were discussed last month at a meeting of the Astronomical Society’s Solar Physics Division. Scientists agree that Cycle 24 is already among the weakest reported.

 

“Not only is this the smallest cycle we’ve seen in the space age, it’s the smallest cycle in 100 years,” NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center research scientist David Hathaway said.

 

Some more radical explanations sound quite alarming. Matthew Penn of the National Solar Observatory says the strength of magnetic field in sunspots in waning, and the sunspot cycle may disappear altogether.

 

“If this trend continues, there will be almost no spots in Cycle 25, and we might be going into another Maunder Minimum,” he said.

 

Maunder Minimum is a period between about 1645 and 1715, in which sunspots became extremely rare. In fact some 18th century astronomers believed sunspots to be a myth. The period coincides with the so-called Little Ice Age, a time when the climate became cold enough for the River Thames in London to freeze in winter. On the gloomier side, the colder summers and harsh winters sealed the fate of the Viking colonies in Greenland, as its population starved and died out.

 

Read more - http://rt.com/news/solar-activity-cycle-maximum-114/


RELATED

THE CLEAREST SUNSPOT PICTURE EVER

http://io9.com/behold-the-clearest-photo-of-a-sunspot-ever-taken-1054493465

 

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