|
In the Bruce Willis star vehicle "Solar Storm" (pitched succesfully as "The Perfect Storm" meets "Armageddon") you'll see Willis, a NASA contractor recently retrenched by budget cuts, trying to warn an ignorant world of an impending catastrophe caused by our inconstant sun. But how would he know? He'd be the only one in possession of a sensitive instrument that can see the far side of the sun, so he's able to see monster sunspots growing there before they rotate into view and fry us all with their solar ejecta.
At this point in the movie, I'll disconnect, faulting the screenwriters for implausible plots fueled by bad science. But Bruce will be impervious to my carping. He'll reconcile with his ex-wife and teenage daughter and hotwire a product-placed GMC Yukon all the way into northern Canada just in time for the final scene, of a huge orange sun rising over melting glaciers as our suddenly survivalist family dons Ray-Bans and gets to work plowing fields. (The daughter's loser boyfriend stowed away in the Yukon's roomy interior but is spared Willis' wrath because he realizes he needs grandchildren for Solar Storm II: Ice Age.)
Never underestimate human ingenuity: In fact, scientists can see the far side of the sun, using a technique called helioseismic holography:
And what are they seeing? The news is bad.
Sunspots 486 and 488, the cause of the largest solar flare in recorded history on Nov 4, are coming back for more. How so? The sun rotates every 24 days at the equator. Sunspots 486 and 488 disappeared from our field of view early November, but have not subsided in strength, and will be cresting the solar horizon in the coming days. So start hoarding the SPF50+.
Well, it's not that bad. Yet. But I think we take the sun for granted. Should it decide to up its energy output (the solar constant) by a mere percentage point, we'd do well to buy up prime polar property.
If you have a spare 20 minutes, and want to be annoyingly knowledgable when this meme goes mainstream again when the sunspots reappear, go ahead and read The Variable Sun, which covers the history of research into the correlation between the solar constant and earth temperatures. In the film, Bruce Willis will quote at length from this paper when in extreme danger. For example, he will desperately mention, while being pursued by a hot and bothered grizzly, that a dearth of sunspots in the 17th century, called the Maunder Minimum, corresponded to a long period of very cold weather called "The Little Ice Age".
To conclude, some solar pornography: A composite live overview. Near real-time close-ups. And MPEGs of Solar ejecta!
Reminds me of a New Yorker article about scientists digging up a hole in Greenland to figure out temperature changes throughout history. The upshot: Greenland was happily fat with errant Vikings until the temperature changed and they were wiped out. The problem with the Ice Age, apparently, was not that it was cold, but that average temperatures experienced a period of volatility. Temperatures were stable and then, wham, over the course of a decade or so, the average temperature was all over the map. Made agriculture and hunting erratic and unsustainable. Lesson: if the world merely got a bit warmer every year, people can adapt. But if one year is warm, the next cold, and the differences vary widely, then just a few years of that will create havoc - the kind that wipes out species.
Posted by: jame on November 14, 2003 02:13 AM