Massive Solar Storm Detonated Hidden American Bombs in 1972

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Boris13c
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one of the many interesting articles generated since the satellite to the sun was launched ... this one is particularly interesting because of all the electronic mayhem created by an abnormally powerful solar flare from the sun

Massive Solar Storm Detonated Hidden American Bombs During the Vietnam War, Navy Records Show
"Space weather" is a collective term for the various energetic gobbets the sun periodically, unpredictably vomits in our general direction. Those gobbets are usually mild, but can be quite powerful. Scientists don't know exactly how often they occur, and the blobs of energy have the potential to do all sorts of damage, from frying the global satellite infrastructure to drastically messing things up for life on Earth. The most powerful example on record was studied in 1859, and its effects were noticed primarily by skywatchers, telegraph operators and folks who spotted the weirdly southern auroras it created. If it happened in our modern electrified era, its consequences would be much more serious.

There have been major space weather incidents since, though none on the scale of the 1859 event. And researchers are still figuring out the extent of their potential for damage. In the Space Weather paper, the researchers dug up old Navy records that suggest a famous 1972 solar storm was even more serious than they had realized.

"Between 2 and 4 August 1972 [a sunspot] produced a series of brilliant flares, energetic particle enhancements and Earth-directed ejecta," they wrote.

Those flares cleared the path for "the subsequent ultra-fast... shock… that reached Earth in record time — 14.6 hours."

People all over the planet noticed that flare's effects.

"Dayside radio blackouts… developed within minutes. X-ray emissions from the long-duration flare remained [high] for [more than] 16 hours. For the first time, a space-based detector observed gamma-rays during this solar flare. [Experts] rated the flare at Comprehensive Flare Index level 17 — the highest level, and one assigned to only the most extreme and broad-spectrum flares," they wrote, adding that "'spectacular aurora,' bright enough to cast shadows, appeared along the southern coast of the United Kingdom… Within two hours commercial airline pilots reported aurora as far south as Bilboa, Spain."

Researchers later found that the flare caused damage to solar panels on satellites in space; a defense communications satellite "suffered a mission-ending on orbit power failure;" and Air Force sensors switched on, suggesting falsely that a nuclear bomb had detonated somewhere on the planet.

"This is one of only a handful of events in the space age that would have posed an immediate threat to astronaut safety," the researchers wrote, "had humans been in transit to the moon at the time."

And somehow, amid all that drama, space weather researchers had largely ignored another consequence of the storm: "the sudden detonation of a 'large number' of US Navy… sea mines [that had been] dropped into the coastal waters of North Vietnam only three months earlier."

Pilots flying over the area spotted about two dozen explosions in a minefield in just a 30-second period, the researchers wrote.

Naval researchers investigated, and they ultimately concluded the blasts were the result of the solar storm triggering magnetic sensors in the mines that had been primed to detect passing metal ships.
pretty impressive display of what the sun can do in ways many never even think about
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Moriarty
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We're due for another major sunspot activity fairly soon, IIRC
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