Back to South
France Retreat and Tour
2012 and the Mayan Calendar
It's official: Solar minimum has arrived. Sunspots have all
but vanished. Solar flares are nonexistent. The sun is utterly quiet.
Like the quiet before a storm.
Researchers announced that a storm is coming--the most intense solar
maximum in fifty years. The prediction comes from a team led by Mausumi
Dikpati of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). "The
next sunspot cycle will be 30% to 50% stronger than the previous one," she
says. If correct, the years ahead could produce a burst of solar activity
second only to the historic Solar Max of 1958.
That was a solar maximum.
 The Space Age was just beginning: Sputnik
was launched in Oct. 1957 and Explorer 1 (the first US satellite) in
Jan. 1958. In 1958 you couldn't tell that a solar storm was underway
by looking at the bars on your cell phone; cell phones didn't exist.
Even so, people knew something big was happening when Northern Lights
were sighted three times in Mexico. A similar maximum now would be
noticed by its effect on cell phones, GPS, weather satellites and many
other modern technologies.
Dikpati's prediction is unprecedented. In
nearly-two centuries since the 11-year sunspot cycle was discovered,
scientists have struggled to predict the size of future maxima---and
failed. Solar maxima can be intense, as in 1958, or barely detectable,
as in 1805, obeying no obvious pattern.
The key to the mystery, Dikpati
realized years ago, is a conveyor belt on the sun. We have
something similar here on Earth---the Great Ocean Conveyor Belt, popularized
in the sci-fi movie The Day After Tomorrow. It is a network of currents
that carry water and heat from ocean to ocean--see the diagram below.
In the movie, the Conveyor Belt stopped and threw the world's weather
into chaos.
The sun's conveyor belt is a current, not of
water, but of electrically-conducting gas. It flows in a loop from the sun's equator to the poles and back
again. Just as the Great Ocean Conveyor Belt controls weather on Earth,
this solar conveyor belt controls weather on the sun. Specifically,
it controls the sunspot cycle.
Solar physicist David Hathaway of the National Space Science & Technology
Center (NSSTC) explains: "First, remember what sunspots are--tangled
knots of magnetism generated by the sun's inner dynamo. A typical sunspot
exists for just a few weeks. Then it decays, leaving behind a 'corpse'
of weak magnetic fields."
Enter the conveyor belt.
"The top of the conveyor belt skims the
surface of the sun, sweeping up the
magnetic fields of old, dead sunspots. The 'corpses' are dragged down at the poles
to a depth of 200,000 km where the sun's magnetic dynamo can amplify them. Once
the corpses (magnetic knots) are reincarnated (amplified), they become buoyant
and float back to the surface." Presto---new sunspots!
 All this happens with massive slowness. "It takes about 40 years
for the belt to complete one loop," says Hathaway. The speed varies "anywhere
from a 50-year pace (slow) to a 30-year pace (fast)."
When the belt is turning "fast," it means that lots of magnetic
fields are being swept up, and that a future sunspot cycle is going
to be intense. This is a basis for forecasting: "The belt was
turning fast in 1986-1996," says Hathaway. "Old magnetic
fields swept up then should re-appear as big sunspots in 2010-2011."
Like most experts in the field, Hathaway has confidence in the conveyor
belt model and agrees with Dikpati that the next solar maximum should
be a doozy. But he disagrees with one point. Dikpati's forecast puts
Solar Max at 2012. Hathaway believes it will arrive sooner, in 2010
or 2011.
"History shows that big sunspot cycles 'ramp
up' faster than small ones," he
says. "I expect to see the first sunspots of the next cycle appear
in late 2006 or 2007---and Solar Max to be underway by 2010 or 2011."
Who's right? Time will tell. Either way, a storm is coming."
To how catastrophic this coming storm will be
no one actually knows,
but EVERYONE is preparing for it because of what happened on September
1-2, 1859, and let's let NASA, again, pick up the story from here:
"Newly uncovered scientific data of recorded
history's most massive space storm is helping a NASA scientist investigate its intensity and
the probability that what occurred on Earth and in the heavens almost
a century-and-a-half ago could happen again.
In scientific circles where solar flares, magnetic
storms and other unique solar events are discussed, the occurrences of September 1-2,
1859, are the star stuff of legend.
Even 144 years ago, many of Earth's
inhabitants realized something momentous had just occurred. Within
hours, telegraph wires in both the United States and Europe spontaneously
shorted out, causing numerous fires, while the Northern Lights, solar-induced
phenomena more closely associated with regions near Earth's North Pole,
were documented as far south as Rome, Havana and Hawaii, with similar
effects at the South Pole.
What happened in 1859 was a combination of several
events that occurred on the Sun at the same time. If they took place separately they would
be somewhat notable events. But together they caused the most potent
disruption of Earth's ionosphere in recorded history. "What they
generated was the perfect space storm," says Bruce Tsurutani,
a plasma physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
To begin to understand the perfect space storm you must first begin
to understand the gargantuan numbers with which plasma physicists like
Tsurutani work every day.
 At over 1.4 million kilometers (869,919 miles)
wide, the Sun contains 99.86 percent of the mass of the entire solar
system: well over a million Earths could fit inside its bulk. The total
energy radiated by the Sun averages 383 billion trillion kilowatts,
the equivalent of the energy generated by 100 billion tons of TNT exploding
each and every second.
But the energy released by the Sun is not always
constant. Close inspection
of the Sun's surface reveals a turbulent tangle of magnetic fields
and boiling arc-shaped clouds of hot plasma dappled by dark, roving
sunspots.
Once in a while--exactly when scientists still
cannot predict--an event occurs on the surface of the Sun that releases a tremendous amount
of energy in the form of a solar flare or a coronal mass ejection,
an explosive burst of very hot, electrified gases with a mass that
can surpass that of Mount Everest.
What transpired during the dog days of summer
1859, across the 150
million-kilometer (about 93 million-mile) chasm of interplanetary space
that separates the Sun and Earth, was this: on August 28, solar observers
noted the development of numerous sunspots on the Sun's surface. Sunspots
are localized regions of extremely intense magnetic fields. These magnetic
fields intertwine, and the resulting magnetic energy can generate a
sudden, violent release of energy called a solar flare. From August
28 to September 2 several solar flares were observed. Then,
on September 1, the Sun released a mammoth solar flare. For almost an entire minute
the amount of sunlight the Sun produced at the region of the flare
actually doubled.
"With the flare came this explosive release of a massive cloud of magnetically
charged plasma called a coronal mass ejection," said Tsurutani. "Not
all coronal mass ejections head toward Earth. Those that do usually take three
to four days to get here. This one took all of 17 hours and 40 minutes," he
noted.
Not only was this coronal mass ejection an extremely
fast mover, the
magnetic fields contained within it were extremely intense and in direct
opposition with Earth's magnetic fields. That meant the coronal mass
ejection of September 1, 1859, overwhelmed Earth's own magnetic field,
allowing charged particles to penetrate into Earth's upper atmosphere.
The endgame to such a stellar event is one heck of a light show and
more -- including potential disruptions of electrical grids and communications
systems.
Back in 1859 the invention of the telegraph was
only 15 years old and
society's electrical framework was truly in its infancy. A 1994 solar
storm caused major malfunctions to two communications satellites, disrupting
newspaper, network television and nationwide radio service throughout
Canada. Other storms have affected systems ranging from cell phone
service and TV signals to GPS systems and electrical power grids.
In March 1989, a solar storm much less intense than the perfect space
storm of 1859 caused the Hydro-Quebec (Canada) power grid to go down
for over nine hours, and the resulting damages and loss in revenue
were estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
"The question I get asked most often is, 'Could
a perfect space storm happen again, and when?'" added
Tsurutani. "I tell people it could, and it could
very well be even more intense than what transpired in 1859. As for
when, we simply do not know," he said."
Now what you just read NASA had written in 2003 and they were being
honest (?) when they said they didn't know when it would happen again,
in their 2006 warning however that "when" question was answered...it
is happening now.
 Oh! And don't forget, what is happening now has
happened before. That
is, of course, if you believe the evidence over what you're told to
believe. And that evidence includes a period of time in our ancient
past when every civilization living on this Earth "suddenly and
mysteriously" decided to quit living above ground and create giant
underground cities, cliff dwelling villages, and build thousands of
pyramids on every continent.
What would cause them to do this? Why would EVERY ONE of the world's
civilizations do such a thing at the EXACT same time?
The "experts" have given so many theories of why
this happened it would take you decades to read them all...but even after reading
them all (and we have) you're left with only questions and no answers
but one...they were all scared out of their minds about "something".
As to what this "something" was that scared an entire Earth's
population into going underground we do actually have a pretty big
clue...the pyramids (and you've got to admit they're pretty big). And
contrary to the many "theories" you've been given about what
pyramids are or aren't, there is one undeniable FACT about all of them.
They are the largest and most secure Faraday Cages every built by humans.
The Great Pyramid of Giza with 3,000 tonnes of granite shielded by
6-7 tonnes of limestone could, literally, have an electromagnetic pulse
(EMP) blast occur right next it, or be hit with the strongest solar
blast ever recorded, and if a human being or any electronic equipment
were stored inside of it they wouldn't be fazed in the slightest.
You can, of course, dispute that this was the
reason the pyramids were built; after all, and according
the "experts", these ancient
peoples didn't have any electronics to save anyway so why would they
build such a mega structure to save something they didn't have? On
the other hand, these same "experts" who tell you that
also conveniently forget to tell you that we don't have the either
the technology or knowhow to build one of these pyramids even if
we wanted to.
At this point I want to remind everyone of you
about one of the most fundamental laws of nature...everything goes
in cycles. There are more
fanciful scientific names to call this law but the word "cycles" encompasses
every one of them.And as our Earth goes in a cycle around the Sun causing
our Seasons to cycle, and as all life on this Planet of ours cycles
from birth to death, and even as history itself is always repeating
itself in cycles, does it stand to reason that larger (actually gigantic)
cycles also occur?
|
