[HN Gopher] Digitized Continuous Magnetic Recordings for the 185...
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Digitized Continuous Magnetic Recordings for the 1859 Carrington
Event
Author : simonebrunozzi
Score : 134 points
Date : 2024-04-23 19:50 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com)
| TheAmazingRace wrote:
| I'm amazed that the scientific community of the time happened to
| have some kind of equipment to measure this phenomenon... all
| right before the time of the American Civil War.
| pvg wrote:
| _happened to have some kind of equipment_
|
| Maxwell's _A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field_ was
| published in 1865 - it 's mostly your perception of the history
| of the relevant science that might be a few decades off.
| iyn wrote:
| Why so snarky? The paper you refer to was published _after_
| the event. I 'm also amazed that it was possible to record
| such event at that time.
| pvg wrote:
| I'm not sure where you got snarky, I'm just giving a little
| info on the state of scientific development of that
| particular field at the time. You need plenty of previous
| work to get to a theory of electromagnetism, as Maxwell
| did. If you prefer something a little earlier and more
| experimental Faraday published his seminal result in 1831.
| It took him about 10 years of fiddling with wires and
| magnets.
|
| _I 'm also amazed_
|
| Which is wonderful! So were 19th century scientists,
| though, and they also figured it out.
| tanseydavid wrote:
| The comment you are responding to, does not seem at all
| snarky to me. Just sayin'.
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| London had an earlier version of the Underground while we were
| busy burning things and shooting at each other in the swamps...
| aardvark179 wrote:
| They didn't just happened to have experiments set up to measure
| the magnetic field, improving navigation is really important if
| your power comes from trade so this sort of thing is funded.
| Roark66 wrote:
| And yet they were saving money by reusing photographic
| plates, bacause (as the article said) the observatory was
| constantly in danger of running out of funding. I guess
| science has always been underfunded.
| xattt wrote:
| Given the topic, is it possible for a solar flare to happen that
| is so large that aurora reach sea level? Or does it turn to
| Cherenkov light at that point?
| yummypaint wrote:
| Given the energy range of protons from the sun, it seems that
| the only way they can reach sea level is if much of the
| atmosphere were already swept away by some huge event.
| londons_explore wrote:
| A big open question appears to be "how often do storms of this
| magnitude occur"
|
| If we wanted answers to that, I think we could inspect chunks of
| iron containing mudstone deposited anytime in the past few
| million years. By looking at the magnetic alignment of iron
| particulates, you will learn the magnetic field when the particle
| was laid down. With particles being so small, it seems likely one
| could reconstruct 5 minutely magnetic field angle, albeit with a
| big linearity error on the time axis due to the uncertainty in
| rate of silt deposits.
|
| However, such a measurement should still give a good estimate of
| the frequency and magnitude of geomagnetic storms.
| jameshart wrote:
| Are you suggesting this because you have some knowledge of the
| field and are aware that this work hasn't been done? It seems
| like if it were so simple someone might have taken a look.
| Magnetic analyses of rock deposits are after all how we know
| about things like the timing and frequency of magnetic pole
| flips.
|
| The Carrington event lasted about 2 weeks. How much silt is
| deposited in that time?
| londons_explore wrote:
| I suspect it hasn't been done because there was no obvious
| value to such data, and the effort of figuring out the
| precise position and magnetic orientation of trillions of
| iron particles would be pretty high...
| exogenousdata wrote:
| Lloyd's of London is a large insurer and is very interested
| in the potential liability that they are exposed to from
| the various insurance policies that they've underwritten.
|
| In 2013, they published a report[0] considering the effects
| of solar storm risk to the North American electric grid.
|
| tldr; it's all about the transformers
|
| [0] - https://assets.lloyds.com/assets/pdf-solar-storm-
| risk-to-the...
| entropic88 wrote:
| They look for carbon 14 isotope spikes in ancient tree rings,
| and compare to beryllium 10 and chlorine 36 in ice cores
|
| We've developed a fairly decent record of events back to 14,000
| years ago
|
| Look up 'Miyake events'
| nicbou wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miyake_event
|
| This keeps getting more interesting!
|
| > Six diverse historical occurrences, from archaeological
| sites to natural disasters, have thus been dated to a
| specific year, using Miyake events as benchmarks and counting
| tree rings. For example, wooden houses in the Viking site at
| L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland were dated by finding the
| 993 CE Miyake event and then counting tree rings, which
| showed that the wood is from a tree felled in 1021 CE.[
| stainforth wrote:
| 13000 years ago seems like a special moment for a few
| events. Is it possible that say a volcano eruption, or a
| meteor strike saturates the atmosphere and normal cosmic
| ray interaction with soot and so on can attribute to what
| they detect in trees?
| hansjorg wrote:
| According to Wikipedia:
|
| > At present, five significant events are known (7176 BCE,
| 5259 BCE, 660 BCE, 774 CE, 993 CE)
|
| Seems like the Carrington event wasn't strong enough to be
| considered a Miyake event.
| pyinstallwoes wrote:
| Interesting one is 12k years ago around Younger Dryas
| shzhdbi09gv8ioi wrote:
| > I think we could inspect chunks of iron containing mudstone
| deposited anytime in the past few million years. By looking at
| the magnetic alignment of iron particulates, you will learn the
| magnetic field when the particle was laid down.
|
| This method has been used to identify the reversal of the
| magnetic pole. [1]
|
| Generally tho, such solar storm lasts for way too short amount
| of time to leave permanent evidence in the rock layers.
| However, I believe they have studied deviations in tree trunk
| rings.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal
| zh3 wrote:
| And to prove the theory of continential drift (through
| Paleomagnetism [0]). Shame that Wegener [1] didn't live to
| see his theory vindicated.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleomagnetism
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Wegener
| netrap wrote:
| I found the software they used for digitization to be
| interesting: https://markummitchell.github.io/engauge-digitizer/
| neuronexmachina wrote:
| Something similar which is more recently-maintained:
| https://github.com/automeris-io/WebPlotDigitizer
| hasmanean wrote:
| If they had used polygonal mirrors instead of flat ones they
| would not have lost any data.
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(page generated 2024-04-24 23:02 UTC)