Mysterious space storms could destroy Internet and global infrastructure

As reported by UQ News, a team of researchers from the University of Queensland led by Dr Benjamin Pope from UQ’s School of Mathematics and Physics, have provided a glimpse into a truly terrifying future for us on Earth.

In their paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A., the team raised the possibility of a ‘mysterious, unpredictable and potentially devastating kind of astrophysical event,’ which could happen very soon in the future and leave everything on Earth irreparably affected. These events are called Miyake Events.

A devastating astrophysical event

As per Dr Pope, Miyake Events are huge bursts of cosmic radiation whose cause remain shrouded in mystery, and these events are so mighty that it could destroy everything in its wake, including things that we on Earth take for granted such as technology including the Internet.

The report quotes Dr. Pope as saying,

These huge bursts of cosmic radiation, known as Miyake Events, have occurred approximately once every thousand years but what causes them is unclear.

The leading theory is that they are huge solar flares.

We need to know more, because if one of these happened today, it would destroy technology including satellites, internet cables, long-distance power lines and transformers.

The effect on global infrastructure would be unimaginable.

The importance of studying tree rings

The team studied tree rings in order to create models which would enable them to study the causes and consequences of the Miyake Events.

As per first author UQ undergraduate maths student Qingyuan Zhang,

Because you can count a tree’s rings to identify its age, you can also observe historical cosmic events going back thousands of years.

When radiation strikes the atmosphere it produces radioactive carbon-14, which filters through the air, oceans, plants, and animals, and produces an annual record of radiation in tree rings.

We modelled the global carbon cycle to reconstruct the process over a 10,000-year period, to gain insight into the scale and nature of the Miyake Events.

One of the scariest things about the Miyake Events is its unpredictability. According to Dr. Pope,

Based on available data, there’s roughly a one per cent chance of seeing another one within the next decade.

But we don’t know how to predict it or what harms it may cause.

These odds are quite alarming, and lay the foundation for further research.

Sources used:

UQ News: ‘Tree rings offer insight into devastating radiation storms’

Proceedings of the Royal Society A.: 'Modelling cosmic radiation events in the tree-ring radiocarbon record'