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September 29, 2009: Planning a trip to Mars? Take plenty of shielding. According to sensors on NASA's ACE (Advanced Composition Explorer) spacecraft, galactic cosmic rays have just hit a Space Age high.
"In 2009, cosmic ray intensities have increased 19% beyond anything we've seen in the past 50 years," says Richard Mewaldt of Caltech. "The increase is significant, and it could mean we need to re-think how much radiation shielding astronauts take with them on deep-space missions."
The cause of the surge is solar minimum, a deep lull in solar activity that began around 2007 and continues today. Researchers have long known that cosmic rays go up when solar activity goes down. Right now solar activity is as weak as it has been in modern times, setting the stage for what Mewaldt calls "a perfect storm of cosmic rays
Earth is in no great peril. Our planet's atmosphere and magnetic field provide some defense against the extra cosmic rays. Indeed, we've experienced much worse in the past. Hundreds of years ago, cosmic ray fluxes were at least 200% to 300% higher than anything measured during the Space Age. Researchers know this because when cosmic rays hit the atmosphere, they produce an isotope of beryllium, 10Be, which is preserved in polar ice. By examining ice cores, it is possible to estimate cosmic ray fluxes more than a thousand years into the past. Even with the recent surge, cosmic rays today are much weaker than they have been at times in the past millennium. [data]
"The space era has so far experienced a time of relatively low cosmic ray activity," says Mewaldt. "We may now be returning to levels typical of past centuries.Source
Gamma Ray Bursts, Gravity Waves, and Earthquakes
On December 26, 2004 a magnitude 9.3 earthquake occurred in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Sumatra in Malaysia. It caused a powerful tsunami which devastated coastal regions of many countries leaving over 240,000 people either dead or missing. It was the worst tsunami to affect this area since the 1883 explosion of Krakatao. The earthquake that produced it was so strong that it exceeded by a factor of 10 the next most powerful earthquake to occur anywhere in the past 25 years.
• Indonesian 9.3 Richter earthquake:
December 26, 2004 at 00 hours 58 minutes (Universal Time)
It is then with some alarm that we learn that just 44.6 hours later gamma ray telescopes orbiting the Earth picked up the arrival of the brightest gamma ray burst ever recorded!
• Gamma ray burst arrival:
December 27, 2004 at 21 hours 36 minutes (Universal Time)Source
Anybody stating that this phenomenon is related to CMEs from the Sun is just full of BS.
Originally posted by Caggy
IU know that we're all a little bit paranoid here but when you live in the border of two large tectonic plates that are colliding all the time you get real quakes, it's just that. A real, old and boring one.
[edit on 28-2-2010 by Caggy]
Originally posted by Logarock
Yea I am not with the harp idea maybe cern but only looking for a source of extra gravitational waves.
Hundreds of aftershocks have followed the Andaman-Sumatra earthquake on 26 December 2004. The magnitude 9.0 earthquake occurred where the Indo-Australian plate is being subducted under the Eurasia Plate. This subduction zone stretches from urma in the west, to West Irian Jaya in the east.
Its important to clear out in ATS too that the colors on the sky seen during the quake were basically the streetlights going down when the power got off and reflected on the misty night on that day