[freebeard]

Remember [hearing about] the Carrington Event?

phys.org/news: Radioactive traces in tree rings reveal Earth's history of unexplained 'radiation storms'

Miyake events

But tree rings also record events we cannot presently explain. In 2012, Japanese physicist Fusa Miyake discovered a spike in the radiocarbon content of tree rings from 774 AD. It was so big that several ordinary years' worth of cosmic rays must have arrived all at once.

As more teams have joined the search, tree ring evidence has been uncovered of further "Miyake events": from 993 AD and 663 BC, and prehistoric events in 5259 BC, 5410 BC, and 7176 BC.

These have already led to a revolution in archaeology. Finding one of these short, sharp spikes in an ancient sample pins its date down to a single year, instead of the decades or centuries of uncertainty from ordinary radiocarbon dating.

Among other things, our colleagues have used the 993 AD event to reveal the exact year of the first European settlement in the Americas, the Viking village at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland: 1021 AD.
....
However, the most widely accepted explanation is that Miyake events are "solar superflares." These hypothetical eruptions from the sun would be perhaps 50–100 times more energetic than the biggest recorded in the modern era, the Carrington Event of 1859.

If an event like this occurred today, it would devastate power grids, telecommunications and satellites. If these occur randomly, around once every thousand years, that is a 1% chance per decade—a serious risk.

Hold on to your [tin foil] hat. Else install a Nikola Tesla Lightning Protection System



Ben Franklin had it all wrong.