Move aside, Carrington, here comes Miyake!

 You folks may remember my posting about the Carrington Event of 1859.  A solar flare caused a rare coronal mass ejection (CME) of great intensity.  The plasma interacted with the magnetic field of the earth, causing it to collapse to the point it acted like a generator.  The only extensive electrical infrastructure of the time, the telegraph, generated high voltages that fried the equipment in some cases,  powered the lines without batteries in other places.  If that happened today, it could fry our electrical grid, destroying hard to replace transformers, shutting down our modern civilization for months if not a year or two.  It could result in mass starvation.  Astronomer Richard Carrington made the connection between the strange events of 1859 and the observed solar storm.

But the good news is that we can spot the CME tthree days ahead of its arrival, shutting down systems to minimize damage (if the Republicans don't pooh-pooh it).  Light travels at 186,000 miles per second and gets here in eight minutes.  CME's travel at a sluggish 1,000,000 miles per hour so it takes 90 hours to get here.  We also have solar observation satellites.  So I was starting to relax about future Carrington Events until ........

https://bigthink.com/hard-science/miyake-event-worse-carrington-event/

Now there's Miyake events.  Japanese woman astronomer Fusa Miyake analyzed tree rings from a chopped down 1900 year-old Japanese tree.  She found that certain rings in that tree have higher Carbon-14 content, generated by doses of radiation  from space100X higher than a Carrington Event.  They tool place in the eighth and tenth centuries.  Subsequent studies using other methods show several events over the last 10,000 years at an average rate of once per millenium.  The good news is that it may be several smaller events over a year or two.  Still bad but not as devastating as a single 100X Carrington.  Such radiation in a single pulse would be fatal to plane travelers at high altitude.  The bad news is that they have no idea where these high energy particle pulses originate.  It could be the sun.  In that case, we might have enough warning to deal with it like a Carrington Event.  But if the origin is a neutron star or the galactic core, we'd have no way to know it was coming.  So it's a point of interest for further study.  Long power lines from big utilities are great but very vulnerable.  This is another advantage to local solar power and windmills.  With a little EMP hardening, they would probably survive a Carrington or even a Miyake.

Since it involves tree rings, the climate change deniers probably won't believe this one either.