The earliest historical record we have of the discovery of Greenland is from 982 by Eric the Red . Three years later the first settlers settled there. The unusually good weather from 1000 to 1300 allowed the colony to flourish thanks to the trade in ivory, seal skins, wood… By the year 1300 there were more than 3,000 settlers living there on 300 farms. But the cold began to arrive in 1325 causing very poor harvests, famine and… death .
In 1350 the settlers left the settlements in northern Greenland , but we do not know where they headed. Falling temperatures caused arctic glaciers to drift south, making navigation from Norway to the island almost impossible . Had it not been for the courage of the Norwegian merchants all communication with Greenland would have been lost. Around 1360 only one ship came every few years, and the last visit to the colony was in 1406. It was entirely by chance: the ship had lost its way during a storm . The discovery of the last burials in the colony reveal the corpses of malnourished and deformed people.
This dramatic turn in climate is called the Little Ice Age. During that time mortality and famine took over the world. The Baltic Sea froze over in the winter of 1422-23, and the River Thames did the same every year. Even Flemish painters like Hendrick Avercamp depicted particularly harsh winters.
What is striking is that the preceding centuries, marked by warm weather, had coincided with the so-called Medieval Maximum of solar activity , and the coldest period of the Little Ice Age coincided with two periods in which the Sun did not show a single stain : the Spörer Minimum (from 1400 to 1510) and the Maunder Minimum (from 1645 to 1715). What is certain is that records obtained over 3,000 years reveal that global temperature drops coincide with minima in solar activity.
The most visible aspect of it are sunspots, dark areas that appear in the photosphere. Interestingly, they had a lot to do with the fate of one of the most famous scientists, Galileo Galilei. Although the Chinese knew of the existence of sunspots since the Shang Dynasty, in 1200 B.C. C., in Europe its discovery is associated with 4 men : David Fabricius, Thomas Harriot, Christoph Schneider and Galileo Galilei . Of the four, the last two persevered in their observations. The bitter and turbulent controversy between Galileo and the Jesuit Schenider over who was the first to observe them had serious consequences for the future of the astronomer. Schneider’s intrigues got the Jesuits to change their attitude towards Galileo: the discussion ended in an open war against the physicist that lasted 20 years. He always suspected that behind the persecution to which he was subjected by the Church was the animosity of the Jesuits, conveniently incited by Schneider.
The sparks that flew from the most famous process in history have nothing to do with how vulnerable we have become since Edison lit up the main street of Menlo Park , today Edison, (New Jersey) on New Year’s Eve 1879. Since then our civilization is critically dependent on electricity, and there we are sold when our Sun gets nervous. We have an example in what happened in March 1989, when a huge sunspot caused the appearance of large eruptions on the surface . These explosions, caused by the magnetic field that created the spot, launched a shower of subatomic particles into space , essentially protons. As they are charged particles, when they reach Earth they move following spiral paths guided by our planet’s magnetic field, which sometimes causes the appearance of electrical currents induced in high-voltage lines. Thus, at 2:45 a.m. on March 13, a particularly intense eruption activated the differentials of the James Bay power station and caused the electrical collapse of the entire province of Quebec, leaving 7 million people without electricity. , including Montréal. The network recovered around midnight that day. Of course, the inhabitants of the darkened Canadian city were able to enjoy some beautiful northern lights.
This is not the only effect of solar flares, which modify the properties of the ionosphere for days. All radio communications fail , as well as artificial satellites, and microchip factories are also affected. The economic cost is significant: a single solar explosion like the one that extinguished Quebec caused losses of tens of millions of dollars and an indirect cost of 2,000 million. Solar flares have also been responsible for radar interference during World War II and the loss of contact with the McMurdo Antarctic base in November 1960, which left it incommunicado and without the possibility of help because there was no way of knowing the local weather conditions.
In view of history, it is worth preparing for future violent and unpredictable solar activity.
