Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday February 08 2017, @09:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the I-speak-for-the-trees dept.

When the activity of the sun changes, it has direct effects on the earth. For example, when the sun is relatively inactive, the amount of a type of carbon called carbon-14 increases in the earth's atmosphere. Because carbon in the air is absorbed by trees, carbon-14 levels in tree rings actually reflect solar activity and unusual solar events in the past. The team took advantage of such a phenomenon by analyzing a specimen from a bristlecone pine tree, a species that can live for thousands of years, to look back deep into the history of the sun.

"We measured the 14C levels in the pine sample at three different laboratories in Japan, the US, and Switzerland, to ensure the reliability of our results," A. J. Timothy Jull of the University of Arizona says. "We found a change in 14C that was more abrupt than any found previously, except for cosmic ray events in AD 775 and AD 994, and our use of annual data rather than data for each decade allowed us to pinpoint exactly when this occurred."

[...] "Although this newly discovered event is more dramatic than others found to date, comparisons of the 14C data among them can help us to work out what happened to the sun at this time," Fusa Miyake of Nagoya University says. She adds, "We think that a change in the magnetic activity of the sun along with a series of strong solar bursts, or a very weak sun, may have caused the unusual tree ring data."

An abstract is available but the full article is paywalled; see: "Large 14C excursion in 5480 BC indicates an abnormal sun in the mid-Holocene" was published in PNAS at: www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1613144114


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 08 2017, @12:13PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 08 2017, @12:13PM (#464505)

    Or a 40 day deluge of rain?