The radiocarbon spike was caused by a massive solar storm, the biggest ever identified. 

A similar solar storm today would be catastrophic for modern technological society — potentially wiping out telecommunications and satellite systems, causing massive electricity grid blackouts, and costing us billions of pounds. 

The academics are warning of the importance of understanding such storms to protect our global communications and energy infrastructure for the future.         

The collaborative research, which was carried out by an international team of scientists, is published today (Oct 9) in The Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences and reveals new insights into the Sun’s extreme behaviour and the risks it poses to Earth.  

A team of researchers from the Collège de France, CEREGE, IMBE, Aix-Marseille University and the University of Leeds measured radiocarbon levels in ancient trees preserved within the eroded banks of the Drouzet River, near Gap, in the Southern French Alps.   

The tree trunks, which are subfossils — remains whose fossilization process is not complete — were sliced into tiny single tree-rings. Analysis of these individual rings identified an unprecedented spike in radiocarbon levels occurring precisely 14,300 years ago. By comparing this radiocarbon spike with measurements of beryllium, a chemical element found in Greenland ice cores, the team proposes that the spike was caused by a massive solar storm that would have ejected huge volumes of energetic particles into Earth’s atmosphere. 

Edouard Bard, Professor of Climate and Ocean Evolution at the Collège de France and CEREGE, and lead author of the study, said: “Radiocarbon is constantly being produced in the upper atmosphere through a chain of reactions initiated by cosmic rays. 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.” 

Potentially catastrophic

The researchers say that the occurrence of similar massive solar storms today could be catastrophic for modern technological society, potentially wiping out telecommunications, satellite systems and electricity grids - and costing us billions of pounds. They warn that it is critical to understand the future risks of events like this, to enable us to prepare, build resilience into our communications and energy systems and shield them from potential damage. 

Tim Heaton, Professor of Applied Statistics in the School of Mathematics at the University of Leeds, said: “Extreme solar storms could have huge impacts on Earth. Such super storms could permanently damage the transformers in our electricity grids, resulting in huge and widespread blackouts lasting months. They could also result in permanent damage to the satellites that we all rely on for navigation and telecommunication, leaving them unusable. They would also create severe radiation risks to astronauts.”    

Miyake Events

Nine such extreme solar storms — known as Miyake Events — have now been identified as having occurred over the last 15,000 years. The most recent confirmed Miyake Events occurred in 993 AD and 774 AD. This newly-identified 14,300-year-old storm is, however, the largest that has ever been found — roughly twice the size of these two. 

The exact nature of these Miyake Events remains very poorly understood as they have never been directly observed instrumentally. They highlight that we still have much to learn about the behaviour of the Sun and the dangers it poses to society on Earth. We do not know what causes such extreme solar storms to occur, how frequently they might occur, or if we can somehow predict them.  

Professor Bard said: “Direct instrumental measurements of solar activity only began in the 17th century with the counting of sunspots. Nowadays, we also obtain detailed records using ground-based observatories, space probes, and satellites. However, all these short-term instrumental records are insufficient for a complete understanding of the Sun. Radiocarbon measured in tree-rings, used alongside beryllium in polar ice cores, provide the best way to understand the Sun’s behaviour further back into the past.” 

The largest, directly-observed, solar storm occurred in 1859 and is known as the Carrington Event. It caused massive disruption on Earth — destroying telegraph machines and creating a night-time aurora so bright that birds began to sing, believing the Sun had begun to rise. However, the Miyake Events (including the newly discovered 14,300-yr-old storm) would have been a staggering entire order-of-magnitude greater in size. 

Professor Heaton said: “Radiocarbon provides a phenomenal way of studying Earth’s history and reconstructing critical events that it has experienced. A precise understanding of our past is essential if we want to accurately predict our future and mitigate potential risks. We still have much to learn. Each new discovery not only helps answer existing key questions but can also generate new ones.” 

Cécile Miramont, Associate Professor of Paleoenvironments and Paleoclimates at IMBE, Aix-en-Provence University, said: “Finding such a collection of preserved trees was truly exceptional. By comparing the widths of the individual tree rings in the multiple tree trunks, we then carefully pieced together the separate trees to create a longer timeline using a method called dendrochronology. This allowed us to discover invaluable information on past environmental changes and measure radiocarbon over an uncharted period of solar activity.” 

Understanding the movements of the tectonic plates that make up the earth’s rigid outer shell is essential to understand the planet’s geological history. The movements of these plates strongly influenced how the planet’s paleogeography and climate have changed over time, and even where to find rare metals. But large oceanic plates from the geological past have since disappeared into the earth’s mantle by means of subduction. They have left behind only fragments of rock hidden in mountain belts. Van de Lagemaat studied the planet’s most complicated plate tectonic region: the area around the Philippines. “The Philippines is located at a complex junction of different plate systems. The region almost entirely consists of oceanic crust, but some pieces are raised above sea level, and show rocks of very different ages.”

Reconstruction

Using geological data, Van de Lagemaat first reconstructed the movements of the current plates in the region between Japan and New Zealand. That revealed how large the area was of plates that must have disappeared in the current western Pacific region. “We also conducted field work on northern Borneo, where we found the most important piece of the puzzle. We thought we were dealing with relicts of a lost plate that we already knew about. But our magnetic lab research on those rocks indicated that our finds were originally from much farther north, and had to be remnants of a different, previously unknown plate.” But the important realisation was yet to come. “11 years ago, we thought that the remnants of Pontus might lie in northern Japan, but we’d since refuted that theory,” explains Douwe van Hinsbergen, Van de Lagemaat’s PhD supervisor. “It was only after Suzanna had systematically reconstructed half of the ‘Ring of Fire’ mountain belts from Japan, through New Guinea, to New Zealand that the proposed Pontus plate revealed itself, and it included the rocks we studied on Borneo.”

Relics

The relics of Pontus are not only located on northern Borneo, but also on Palawan, an island in the Western Philippines, and in the South China Sea. Van de Lagemaat’s research also showed that a single coherent plate tectonic system stretched from southern Japan to New Zealand, and it must have existed for at least 150 million years. That is also a new discovery in the field.

Waves

The previous predictions of the existence of Pontus were made possible because a subducted plate leaves behind traces when it ‘sinks’ into the earth’s mantle: zones in the mantle with anomalous temperatures or compositions. These anomalies can be observed when seismographs pick up signals from earthquakes. Earthquakes send waves through Earth’s interior, and when they travel through an anomaly, such as a fragment from an old plate, the anomaly produces a disruption of the signal. Geologists can trace these disruptions to the existence of phenomena in the mantle, such as fragments of tectonic plates. That allows them to look 300 million years into the past; older plate fragments have ‘dissolved’ at the boundary between the mantle and the core. The study from 11 years ago showed that a large subduction zone must have run through the western paleo-Pacific Ocean, which separated the known Pacific plates in the east from the hypothetical Pontus plate in the west. This hypothesis has now been independently demonstrated by Van de Lagemaat’s research.

“Freshwater habitats in general are getting saltier for a number of reasons, including road salt and agricultural runoff, extraction of coal and natural gas, drought, and sea level rise,” says David Buchwalter, professor of toxicology at NC State and corresponding author of the research. “Freshwater insects and other organisms that live in these systems are used as indicators of the ecosystem’s health. When these systems get saltier, we see that insect diversity decreases, but we aren’t sure why.”

Aquatic animals (including insects and crustaceans) must constantly maintain the correct balance of water and salts within their body — a process called osmoregulation. Theoretically, the most favorable environment for aquatic animals would be one where external salinity levels are close to those inside the animal. That way the animal doesn’t have to work as hard to maintain osmoregulation.

However, the opposite seems to be true for freshwater insects — higher salinity is always associated with increased rates of ion uptake in insects, but it is also associated with developmental delays or death.

“We thought that freshwater insects might be shifting so much of their energy toward osmoregulation in saltier environments that they cannot grow or thrive,” Buchwalter says. “So we measured the metabolic rates of crustaceans and insects in dilute and saline environments to see if metabolic responses to salinity were similar.”

The team looked at three types of freshwater animals — two species of gammarid, or “scud,” which is a small freshwater crustacean; one freshwater snail; and three aquatic insect species.

In the first test, they measured the animals’ metabolism by placing them in waters with different concentrations of salt ions and looking at their rates of oxygen consumption. They observed that more dilute conditions made the crustaceans and snail breathe harder, increasing their metabolism, while insects’ metabolic rates were constant regardless of salinity.

Next, the team looked at whether an increase in breathing rates was linked to the transport of a particular ion. Radioactive isotopes of the salt ions calcium and sodium allowed the researchers to measure how much and how quickly the animals took up different ions.

The researchers found that calcium was the key driver of non-insects’ increased metabolism in lower salinity. In other words, the crustaceans and snail worked harder to transport the calcium ions they required in an environment where calcium was harder to find.

In contrast, the insects’ metabolic rates remained constant in both saline and dilute environments, even though they had a higher calcium ion transport rate in the saline environment. Insects seem to have very little demand for calcium; in fact, previous research has shown that excess calcium is potentially toxic to them.

The researchers think that the animals’ use of internal energy, or active transport, when moving the salts could be the explanation.

“When we see non-insects’ metabolisms increase in dilute environments, it could be due to the fact that they have to work harder to take in more calcium,” Buchwalter says. “And while it seems counterintuitive, the opposite is true for insects who are working harder in a more saline environment to maintain equilibrium, although their respiration rates don’t increase. Instead, they appear to utilize resources that would otherwise be dedicated to growth and development to ‘undo’ excessive ion uptake when things get saltier.

“Moving salt ions has an energy cost to the animal,” Buchwalter says. “So for freshwater insects, the idea that organisms should thrive in environments that are close to their internal salinity is wrong. Additionally, their low demand for calcium may help them thrive in very dilute environments where insects typically dominate the ecology. In contrast, low calcium appears to be stressful for the crustaceans and snail in this study. It is fascinating that species living in the same habitats can have such different physiologies.”

Future work will explore whether these physiological differences are based on the ancestry of the organisms tested, or the use of calcium in their exoskeletons/shells.

The work appears in the Journal of Experimental Biology and was supported by the National Science Foundation under grant IOS 1754884. First author and Ph.D. candidate Jamie Cochran was supported by a Goodnight Doctoral Fellowship. Catelyn Banks, formerly a student at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, also contributed to the work.

The aim of the study was to assess whether fathers’ parental leave influences alcohol-related morbidity and mortality. In order to try to find out if that is the case, the researchers have investigated the effects of parental leave policy that was implemented in Sweden in 1995. The policy encouraged fathers to use parental leave by reserving 30 days of leave for their use alone and resulted in the proportion of fathers using parental leave increasing from 43 percent to 75 percent.

“Our findings were pretty remarkable considering the severity of the studied outcome. Although alcohol-related hospitalizations were rather uncommon, we found that after the policy was implemented there was a 34% decrease in these hospitalizations among fathers in the two years after birth, as well as smaller decreases up to 8 and 18 years after birth,” says Helena Honkaniemi, researcher at the Department of Public Health Sciences, Stockholm University.

“Most changes were found among hospitalizations for alcohol intoxication and alcohol-related mental and behavioral disorders. Additional analyses evaluating actual changes in parental leave use from before to after the policy suggest that these health consequences could be explained by the increase in fathers’ parental leave use, rather than other underlying trends,” says Helena Honkaniemi.

However, no changes were found for alcohol-related mortality.

Co-author Associate Professor Sol Juárez believes that the results of the study could be useful for policymakers.

“Policymakers should consider that fathers’ parental leave not only promotes more gender-equal participation in childcare, but can also reduce alcohol-related harms,” Juárez says.

The study “Alcohol-related morbidity and mortality by fathers’ parental leave: A quasi-experimental study in Sweden” draws on Swedish register data of all fathers of singleton children born from January 1992 to December 1997, three years before and after the policy was implemented.

Planets form in disks of gas and dust, known as protoplanetary disks, around protostars, young stars still in the process of forming. Planet growth is so slow that it’s not possible to watch the evolution as it happens, so astronomers observe many protostars at slightly different stages of planet formation to build up a theoretical understanding.

This time an international research team led by Satoshi Ohashi at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to conduct high-resolution observations of a protoplanetary disk around a relatively young protostar, DG Taurus located 410 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Taurus. The team found that DG Taurus has a smooth protoplanetary disk, without any rings which would indicate that planets are forming. This led the team to believe that DG Taurus system will start forming planets in the future.

The team found that in this pre-planet-formation stage, the dust grains within 40 AU (about twice the size of the orbit of Uranus in the Solar System) of the central protostar are still small, while beyond this radius the dust grains have started to grow in size, the first step in planet formation. This is contrary to theoretical expectations that planet formation starts in the inner part of the disk.

These results provide surprising new information about the dust distribution and other conditions at the start of planet formation. Future studies of more examples will further improve our understanding of planet formation.

Some of the most common symptoms of the ‘long cold’ included coughing, stomach pain, and diarrhea more than 4 weeks after the initial infection. While the severity of an illness appears to be a key driver of risk of long-term symptoms, more research is being carried out to establish why some people suffer extended symptoms while others do not.

The findings suggest that there may be long-lasting health impacts following non-COVID acute respiratory infections such as colds, influenza, or pneumonia, that are currently going unrecognised. However, the researchers do not yet have evidence suggesting that the symptoms have the same severity or duration as long Covid.

The research, funded by Barts Charity, compared the prevalence and severity of long-term symptoms after an episode of COVID-19 vs. an episode of another acute respiratory infection that tested negative for COVID-19. Those recovering from COVID-19 were more likely to experience light-headedness or dizziness and problems with taste and smell compared to those who had a non-COVID-19 respiratory infection.

While long Covid is now a recognised condition, there have been few studies comparing long-term symptoms following SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus infection vs. other respiratory infections.

The study is the latest output from COVIDENCE UK, Queen Mary University of London’s national study of COVID-19, launched back in 2020 and still in follow-up, with over 19,000 participants enrolled. This study analysed data from 10,171 UK adults, with responses collected via questionnaires and statistical analysis carried out to identify symptom clusters.

Giulia Vivaldi, researcher on COVIDENCE UK from Queen Mary University of London and the lead author of the study, said: “Our findings shine a light not only on the impact of long Covid on people’s lives, but also other respiratory infections. A lack of awareness — or even the lack of a common term — prevents both reporting and diagnosis of these conditions.

“As research into long Covid continues, we need to take the opportunity to investigate and consider the lasting effects of other acute respiratory infections.

“These ‘long’ infections are so difficult to diagnose and treat primarily because of a lack of diagnostic tests and there being so many possible symptoms. There have been more than 200 investigated for long Covid alone.”

Professor Adrian Martineau, Chief Investigator of COVIDENCE UK and Clinical Professor of Respiratory Infection and Immunity at Queen Mary University of London, said: “Our findings may chime with the experience of people who have struggled with prolonged symptoms after having a respiratory infection despite testing negative for COVID-19 on a nose or throat swab.

“Ongoing research into the long-term effects of COVID-19 and other acute respiratory infections is important because it can help us to get to the root of why some people experience more prolonged symptoms than others. Ultimately this could help us to identify the most appropriate form of treatment and care for affected people.”

Victoria King, Director of Funding and Impact at Barts Charity said: “Barts Charity swiftly supported COVIDENCE UK in response to the outbreak of COVID-19 to help inform of its risk factors and impacts. These findings highlight not only the long-term symptoms experienced by people after Covid infection, but by people after other acute respiratory infections as well. As we learn more about long Covid symptoms and their possible treatments, studies like this help to build greater awareness around other prolonged respiratory infections that may be going unrecognised.”

Editor’s Note: See also “You’ve heard of long COVID, but did you know there might also be a long cold?” by Giulia Vivaldi, Queen Mary University of London, in The Conversation: https://theconversation.com/youve-heard-of-long-covid-but-did-you-know-there-might-also-be-a-long-cold-214995

Details of past climate conditions are revealed to researchers not only by sediment samples from the ocean floor, but also by the surface of the seafloor, which is exposed to currents that are constantly altering it. Deposits shaped by near-bottom currents are called contourites. These sediment deposits contain information about past ocean conditions as well as clues to climate. Contourites are often found on continental slopes or around deep-sea mountains. But they can be found in any environment where strong currents occur near the seafloor. The mechanisms that control them are not yet well understood. Experiments in flume tanks will help to change this through the depiction of deposition in future models.

Detailed observations of changes in flume-tank experiments

Henriette Wilckens, first author of the newly published study, created a replica of the continental slope in a special flume tank at the University of Utrecht (Netherlands). Currents and sediment input in the flume tank were simulated using pumps and monitored with a current meter. The formation and development of the sediment deposits were measured with a laser scanner. All the data obtained were compared to measurements in natural ocean systems in order to validate the results of the experiments.

“The internal sediment architecture of contourites can be observed from seismic data, but in order to unlock information about the past ocean currents we need a better understanding of how they developed and the factors that influence the contourite systems,” explains Wilckens. While it is impossible to directly see how natural marine systems that developed over time periods of thousands to millions of years started to form on the seafloor, scientists can employ flume-tank experiments to directly observe detailed changes of the seafloor morphology and control their related current velocities.

Huge application potential of the models

“Our experiment can also be applied to the entire deep sea and even to lakes,” says Henriette Wilckens, meaning anywhere in the deep sea where there is a slope, terraces, deep-sea mountains or, for example, cold-water coral mounds.

It is also conceivable that the models could be applied, for example, to improve predictions of how currents transport microplastic particles or other pollutants in the ocean. “The potential for its application,” says Wilckens, “is immense. The system must first be understood before it is possible to derive information from it.”

Opening a new branch of research

“This research work is an important step toward a better understanding of the ways in which ocean currents control the deposition of particles in the seafloor, which has important implications for paleoceanographic reconstructions and benthic ecology. This introduces a new branch of research that will probably lead to even more exciting discoveries,” according to Elda Miramontes, co-author of the study and head of the “Sedimentology” working group at MARUM.