Live data from Hacker News

The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

daily.jstor.org

1–10 of 158 posts

Re: The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

#2
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3165629_Characteris...

I'm reading this critical analysis of it (2013):

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292848789_Geometry_...

> The interpretation of individual rock art images and related art forms as local perspectives on a single celestial phenomenon requires a determination of scale, perspective, and temporal evolution. Peratt interpreted dotted circles and concentric circles as bottom-up renditions of a diocotron instability affecting the hollow outer sheets of the z-pinch (Peratt 2003:1209–1210,1212), while he derived ‘ladders’, ‘caterpillars’, ‘birds on sticks’, ‘squattermen’, ‘Kokopelli’, and many other forms from instabilities in the solid inner core of the lower segment of the auroral beam, viewed sideways or at an oblique angle (Peratt 2003:1193–1205). So far, so good— the matches between these respective instabilities and their petroglyphic correlates are indeed compelling. Problems appear when the geographic distribution of such designs is taken into account.

Re: The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

#3

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3165629_Characteris... I'm reading this critical analysis of it (2013): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292848789_Geometry_... > The interpretation of individual rock art images and related art forms as local perspectives on a single celestial phenomenon requires a determination of scale, perspective, and temporal evolution. Peratt interpreted dotted circles and conce…

I’m trying to understand what kind of phenomenon beams a column of light into the sky from the South Pole. I can understand auroral curtains, but a cylinder beam sounds far-fetched.

Re: The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

#5
If these events associate with solar motion through the local interstellar cloud perhaps the onset will take a while, and that will allow for some mitigations to be made, even if there is no way to predict when that might happen.

... what if one of the Voyager spacecraft is heading in the "right" direction to see something ...

Re: The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

#6
post #4

This does sound quite scary and impact of such a even would cross the impact what COVID-19 had on all of us.

In some respects it would have an opposite effect: no more Zoom calls; if you want contact with someone, go out and find them.

Seems like it could require additional police presence, and they'll find it difficult to be effective without radios. We will need to look at centuries-old playbooks for virtually all aspects of life, temporarily. Hoaxes will spread without rapid fact checking.

Re: The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

#7
> and in the event we would lose the data almost as soon as we had found it.

Why? I suppose because the equipment to capture the data is electrical (or electronic).

But given that a Miyake Event is something that's never been observed, even using non-electrical detectors, I don't see why ordinary optical detectors (e.g. eyes) couldn't capture at least a lot of useful data. And if we can make detectors that work in the environment of the LHC, surely we can make detectors that are screened against a solar storm.

Re: The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

#8
post #6
post #4

This does sound quite scary and impact of such a even would cross the impact what COVID-19 had on all of us.

In some respects it would have an opposite effect: no more Zoom calls; if you want contact with someone, go out and find them. Seems like it could require additional police presence, and they'll find it difficult to be effective without radios. We will need to look at centuries-old playbooks for virtually all aspects of life, temporarily. Hoaxes will spread without rapid fact checking.

It would also lead to the collapse of vital systems: transport, utilities, payments....

> Hoaxes will spread without rapid fact checking.

They already do. I think you have found the silver lining: hoaxes will spread a lot slower.

Re: The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

#9
I've wondered for a while. Lots of people seem to think a Carrington Event will simply fry all small electronics and make everything stop working, but from my understanding all it'll actually do is cause power surges in long transmission lines and disrupt wireless signals. Apparently telegraph lines sparked and shocked people. So what effect will that actually have now? Will a massive power surge go through my house and destroy everything plugged in, and thus indirectly my desktop computer? Will every house on the grid catch fire, destroying all modern cities? Or will substations and transformers be destroyed but shield homes themselves from catastrophic damage? Will wildfires destroy every forest anywhere near modern infrastructure?

Re: The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

#10
> Consequently, more radiocarbon is packed into a single growth ring, and scientists can determine the exact year that ring was built. They can then count to the outer ring of the tree to know the year that it died.

The article somewhat confused the details. To determine the exact year the ring was built (and subsequently year the tree died) scientists look at the growth pattern of the surrounding rings and compare them with a reference data set of ring width of the same tree species in the same (wider) area. This works even if the outer ring is not present. The outer ring is only relevant if we want to determine the exact year a tree had been cut down, which is important for archaeology but not to establish the date of the Miyake event in the first place.

> ... providing definitive evidence that the Vikings beat Columbus to North America.

> ... The researchers speculated that the settlement was built sometime near the end of the first millennium

This was no "speculation", but has already been established as a fact for decades with the excavation of the settlement of L’Anse aux Meadows itself in the early 1960s. Tree ring dating only helped to identify the specific date of the settlement in the already established time frame, because the only fitting Miyake event was that of 992/993. (The article mentions this, but the chain of reasoning is not really accurate.)

The problem with determining the exact date of the settlement without the reference to the Miyake event was that we do not have a reference record for the tree rings at this site, as this requires an uninterrupted record of overlapping trees from the present back to the Viking Age for these particular timber species in the area.

This could perhaps been established with a lot of effort over the years, but with the Miyake events we have indeed a very interesting method to compile reference records even without a complete reference record to the present. However, it still remains uncertain, for example, to which Miyake event a particular piece of wood should be attributed without much context, whether we already know all the Miyake events of the last couple of millennia, and whether another, more local event could have led to a carbon-14 value that could be confused with a global Miyake event.

Post reply on HN