14,300-Year-Old Tree Reveals Apocalyptic Warning for Today’s Humans

Evidence of the most powerful solar storm in history has been uncovered in an unlikely place: within the rings of a tree.

This immensely powerful solar storm is thought to have been at least 10 times as powerful as the Carrington Event of 1859, which caused chaos in the rudimentary telegraph system of the time.

New research has now found that a radiocarbon spike found within ancient tree rings in the French Alps reveals the full extent of the sun’s power, and the potential danger it poses to us if a storm of this scale occurs today, according to a study published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A Mathematical Physical and Engineering Sciences.

“Extreme solar storms could have huge impacts on Earth,” Tim Heaton, professor of applied statistics at the University of Leeds in England and co-author of the paper, said in a statement.

The researchers found a strange spike in radiocarbon within the rings of subfossilized trees dating to around 14,300 years ago. This spike was found to line up with patterns in beryllium levels in Greenland ice cores, indicating that the spike was caused by a huge solar storm.

“Radiocarbon is constantly being produced in the upper atmosphere through a chain of reactions initiated by cosmic rays,” Edouard Bard, a professor of climate and ocean evolution at the Collège de France and CEREGE, and lead author of the study, said in the statement. “Recently, scientists have found that extreme solar events including solar flares and coronal mass ejections can also create short-term bursts of energetic particles which are preserved as huge spikes in radiocarbon production occurring over the course of just a single year.”

Solar storms like this one and the Carrington Event are caused by solar flares, which are ejections of powerful X-rays from the sun.

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