Speaker 1: I want you to imagine just for a second that
Speaker 1: you are the lead architect of a multimillion dollar satellite.
Speaker 2: Now, oh wow, no pressure there, right right.
Speaker 1: I mean, you've spent years, maybe decades even planning this
Speaker 1: entire infrastructure. You've got these incredibly anxious investors breathing down your.
Speaker 3: Neck as they do exactly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you have entire sectors of global communications depending
Speaker 1: on your network. So you finally do it. You successfully
Speaker 1: launch hundreds of these hyper soshisticated pieces of hardware into lower.
Speaker 2: Orbit, a massive achievement, honestly huge.
Speaker 1: And to keep them safe, you know, to make sure
Speaker 1: they don't literally just fall out of the sky and
Speaker 1: burn up. You are relying on the absolute gold standard
Speaker 1: of space weather forecasts.
Speaker 2: The best data money can buy, exactly.
Speaker 1: The best astrochrist models that human civilization has to offer.
Speaker 1: And these agencies, with billions in funding, they look you
Speaker 1: in the eye and tell you that the environment up there.
Speaker 2: Is going to be quiet, basically telling you the sun
Speaker 2: is taking a nap.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So you build your network for a calm environment,
Speaker 1: You optimize your fuel, you lower your orbits to reduce latency.
Speaker 2: You're feeling great, makes total sense based on the data, but.
Speaker 1: Then without warning, the upper atmosphere just suddenly boils up.
Speaker 1: What was supposed to be a near vacuum suddenly turns
Speaker 1: into this invisible, expanding wall of friction.
Speaker 2: It's like hitting a brick wall made of air.
Speaker 1: Yes, it grabs your satellites like they're driving into a swamp,
Speaker 1: and it just starts dragging them out of the.
Speaker 2: Sky, bowling them right down.
Speaker 1: And you just have to sit there and watch the
Speaker 1: telemetry on your screens as your life's work burns up
Speaker 1: in the atmosphere one by one.
Speaker 2: It sounds like a total nightmare.
Speaker 1: You'd think I'm pitching you the setup for a new
Speaker 1: sci fi disaster movie, right, But I'm not. That is
Speaker 1: not a hypothetical scenario. It actually happened recently.
Speaker 2: It did, and the implications of it are just absolutely staggering.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's the kind of event that forces a
Speaker 2: complete reckoning in a scientific.
Speaker 1: Field because they got it so wrong.
Speaker 2: Exactly when the physical reality of what is happening above
Speaker 2: our heads collides that violently with the supercomputer models we
Speaker 2: used to predict it. You can't just tweak a minor
Speaker 2: variable in an equation. You have to stop and ask
Speaker 2: if your entire fundamental understanding of the system is just well.
Speaker 1: Flawed, welcome to thrilling threads today. Our mission is to
Speaker 1: untangle a cosmic mystery that is right now actively threatening
Speaker 1: the modern interconnected way of life that you and I
Speaker 1: take for granted.
Speaker 2: We're looking directly at solar cycle twenty five, right.
Speaker 1: This is a current period of intense solar activity that
Speaker 1: didn't just surprise scientists, it fundamentally broke the predictive models
Speaker 1: of the world's top astrophysicists.
Speaker 2: It shattered them. Really.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So if you're listening to this on a smartphone
Speaker 1: or using GPS to navigate your car, you are currently
Speaker 1: relying on a fragile chain of technology that was built
Speaker 1: under a.
Speaker 2: False premise, a very expensive false premise.
Speaker 1: Seriously, think about humanity's reliance on these solar forecasts. Like,
Speaker 1: it's as if we decide to build a massive, intricate
Speaker 1: sand castle right on the edge of the beach.
Speaker 2: Okay, I like this analogy, and.
Speaker 1: We felt totally safe doing it because we checked the
Speaker 1: official tide chart, and the chart guaranteed the water wouldn't
Speaker 1: come anywhere near us for years.
Speaker 2: So you build it as close to the water as
Speaker 2: you want, right, But.
Speaker 1: Then we realize, right as the water starts rushing in
Speaker 1: and dissolving the walls of our castle, that the ocean
Speaker 1: is playing by a completely different set of rules. We
Speaker 1: built our entire digital sand castle based on a fundamentally
Speaker 1: flawed understanding of the tide.
Speaker 2: That is the perfect analogy for the vulnerability we've created
Speaker 2: for ourselves, because, you know, to understand the very real
Speaker 2: danger that is hovering above us right now, we can't
Speaker 2: just look at today's satellite data. We actually have to
Speaker 2: travel back a few years.
Speaker 1: How far back?
Speaker 2: We need to go back to an April twenty nineteen
Speaker 2: meeting where the scientific establishment made what turn out to
Speaker 2: be a dangerously confident prediction. Oh well, okay, and we're
Speaker 2: going to untack exactly how that prediction was made and
Speaker 2: why it failed so spectacularly, looking at the poststorm impact analyses,
Speaker 2: the fundamental physics of the solar dynamo, and some very
Speaker 2: recent sobering reviews from the exact scientists who had to
Speaker 2: admit they were wrong.
Speaker 1: Right, okay, so let's set the scene. Take us into
Speaker 1: that room. If I am a fly on the wall
Speaker 1: in April twenty nineteen, who am I? Looking at and
Speaker 1: what exactly are they trying to do?
Speaker 2: You are looking at a gathering of the absolute heavyweights
Speaker 2: in space weather. I mean you have top tier solar
Speaker 2: physicists from NOAA, from NASA, and from the International Space
Speaker 2: Environment Services, best of the best exactly, and they sat
Speaker 2: down to do what this specific field has been doing
Speaker 2: formally since nineteen eighty nine. They were going to predict
Speaker 2: the behavior, the timing, and the maximum strength of the
Speaker 2: next solar cycle, which was solar cycle twenty five.
Speaker 1: And just to clarify for everyone listening, a solar cycle
Speaker 1: is this roughly eleven year period where the Sun goes
Speaker 1: from being relatively calm to violently active and back to calm.
Speaker 2: Against right, like a heartbeat. But how do they.
Speaker 1: Actually measure that? Like, if I'm looking at the Sun
Speaker 1: through a heavily tinted solar filter, what am I actually counting?
Speaker 1: To give me a number?
Speaker 2: You are counting sunspots. The consensus prediction they were trying
Speaker 2: to arrive at is what we call the smooth.
Speaker 3: Sunspot number of spots.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, And this goes all the way back to
Speaker 2: scientists like Galileo and later Rudolph Wolf in the eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 2: They realized that the number of dark blemishes the sun
Speaker 2: spots on the Sun's surface directly correlates with its overall
Speaker 2: violent activity.
Speaker 1: So what is a sun spot? Exactly?
Speaker 2: Physically, a sunspot is basically a massive magnetic storm on
Speaker 2: the surface of the Sun. So a low sunspot number
Speaker 2: means a quiet sun. A high number means a very active,
Speaker 2: potentially dangerous star that is hurling radiation and plasma into
Speaker 2: the solar system.
Speaker 1: So it's essentially a weighted thermometer for the Sun's temper exactly.
Speaker 2: That's a great way to put it.
Speaker 1: And these physicists in twenty nineteen, they didn't just throw
Speaker 1: darts at a board, right, I mean, they brought an
Speaker 1: immense amount of computational power to this meeting to try
Speaker 1: and read that thermometer years in advance.
Speaker 2: Oh, unprecedented computationational power. They pulled close to fifty independent
Speaker 2: forecasts from specialized research groups all over the.
Speaker 1: Globe fifty wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And they ran all of this historical data through
Speaker 2: highly complex dynamo simulations, statistical models, advanced machine learning systems,
Speaker 2: the works, and they used various precursor methods that had,
Speaker 2: to their credit, worked reasonably well over the past few cycles.
Speaker 2: They were looking at the Sun's polar magnetic fields, they
Speaker 2: were looking at plasma flows. They were crunching decades of telemetry.
Speaker 1: So they have all the dating in the world, right.
Speaker 2: They synthesized all of this vast disparate data to arrive
Speaker 2: at a single unified consensus number for the upcoming cycle
Speaker 2: twenty five.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the drum roll moment, with all the smartest
Speaker 1: minds and the most powerful computers in the world, what
Speaker 1: was the definitive number they landed on.
Speaker 2: The official consensus prediction was that cycle twenty five would
Speaker 2: peak at a smooth subspot number of exactly one hundred.
Speaker 3: And fifteen one hundred and fifteen yep, and.
Speaker 2: They predicted this peak would arrive sometime around July twenty
Speaker 2: twenty five. They included error bars naturally, allowing for a
Speaker 2: maximum somewhere between one hundred and five and an absolute
Speaker 2: upper bound of one twenty five.
Speaker 1: Okay, so one twenty five is the absolute highest they
Speaker 1: thought it could possibly go.
Speaker 2: Exactly, and the timing of the peak they said could
Speaker 2: hit anywhere from November twenty twenty four to March twenty
Speaker 2: twenty six, but one hundred and fifteen was the central target, a.
Speaker 1: Peak of one hundred and fifteen. Now, for context, historically
Speaker 1: speaking over the centuries we've been tracking, this is one
Speaker 1: hundred and fifteen a frightening number or reassuring number.
Speaker 2: It is incredibly reassuring. It's actually quite low. Oh really, Yeah,
Speaker 2: the long term historical average for a solar cycle peak
Speaker 2: is around one hundred and seventy nine.
Speaker 1: Okay, so one hundred and fifteen is well below.
Speaker 2: Outage, way below. What the panel was essentially saying was
Speaker 2: that cycle twenty five was going to be a near
Speaker 2: twin of the cycle that preceded it. Cycle twenty four
Speaker 2: was actually the weakest solar cycle in one hundred years.
Speaker 2: It peaked at a sunspot number of just one hundred
Speaker 2: and sixteen.
Speaker 1: Wait, let me make sure I'm following the logic here.
Speaker 1: The supercomputers looked at the data and concluded the last
Speaker 1: cycle was historically weak, therefore this next side will also
Speaker 1: be historically weak.
Speaker 2: In a nutshell, yes.
Speaker 1: It feels a bit like predicting the weather by just
Speaker 1: saying tomorrow will be exactly like yesterday. Was there deeper
Speaker 1: physics backing that up?
Speaker 2: There was? Yeah, and it was heavily supported by the
Speaker 2: literature at the time. There was a highly influential twenty
Speaker 2: eighteen paper published in Nature Communications by researchers Perniccobamic and
Speaker 2: Debien du Nandi, and their dynamo based prediction fed directly
Speaker 2: into the panel's consensus. Their incredibly complex models projected that
Speaker 2: cycle twenty five would indeed be very weak, peaking around
Speaker 2: twenty twenty four, give or take.
Speaker 1: A year, so they had the math to back up
Speaker 1: the assumption exactly.
Speaker 2: So the official unified forecast delivered to the world was
Speaker 2: basically expect a quiet cycle. The coast is clear. Keep
Speaker 2: launching your satellites.
Speaker 1: So we have all the agencies, all the supercomputers, all
Speaker 1: the peer reviewed papers pointing in the exact same direction.
Speaker 1: Don't worry. The sun has taken a nap. And that
Speaker 1: comforting picture. That sand castle we built on the beach,
Speaker 1: it actually stood for a little while, didn't it. The
Speaker 1: beginning of the cycle looked normal.
Speaker 2: It held up for about three years. The early stages
Speaker 2: of a solar cycle are notoriously slow and difficult to
Speaker 2: distinguish from one another, but by the time we crossed
Speaker 2: into twenty twenty one and early twenty twenty two, and
Speaker 2: the daily observations started accumulating. A creeping sense of unease
Speaker 2: started washing over the space weather community.
Speaker 1: The data wasn't matching the model.
Speaker 3: Not at all.
Speaker 2: It became clear that something was fundamentally off. The daily
Speaker 2: sunspot counts were consistently running ahead of where the official
Speaker 2: panel said they should be. It wasn't a sudden explosion.
Speaker 2: It was this incredibly consistent, stubborn upward trend.
Speaker 1: It's like tracking a hurricane on a radar that is
Speaker 1: just slightly off its predicted path, but instead of correcting
Speaker 1: back to the line, it just keeps drifting further and
Speaker 1: further away, growing larger than the model said was thermodynamically possible.
Speaker 2: That's a really great way to visualize it. And by
Speaker 2: January twenty twenty three, the data was openly defying the models.
Speaker 2: It wasn't just a minor statistical anomaly anymore.
Speaker 3: It was trend, a huge one.
Speaker 2: The daily sunspot counts for cycle twenty five had already
Speaker 2: overtaken cycle twenty four at the equivalent point in its
Speaker 2: progression by roughly twelve percent.
Speaker 1: Oh wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the Sun was actively producing more spots, more complex
Speaker 2: magnetic regions, more massive flares than the consensus had penciled in,
Speaker 2: and scientists were sitting in their offices watching the reality
Speaker 2: curve completely divorce itself from their prediction curve in real time.
Speaker 1: And it didn't just divorce itself, it shattered the ceiling
Speaker 1: completely because fast forward to August twenty twenty four, the
Speaker 1: thirteen month smooth sunspot number didn't just hit that predicted
Speaker 1: one fifteen. It hit one fifty six point seven.
Speaker 2: Yes, and we really need to pause and recognize the
Speaker 2: magnitude of that miss. That figure didn't just miss the bullseye.
Speaker 2: It didn't even land on the dartboard. It was off
Speaker 2: the charts, completely outside the maximum uncertainty range of the
Speaker 2: original forecast. Remember, their absolute worst case upper bound was
Speaker 2: one hundred and twenty five. One hundred and fifty six
Speaker 2: point seven obliterates that. And not only was the cycle
Speaker 2: vastly stronger, but the peak itself arrived almost a full
Speaker 2: year ahead of schedule.
Speaker 1: So they were fundamentally wrong on the amplitude and they
Speaker 1: were fundamentally wrong on the timing.
Speaker 2: Essentially. Yes, Mark Meisch, the solar cycle lead at the SWPC,
Speaker 2: came out and issued a revised experimental forecast effectively walking
Speaker 2: back the twenty nineteen panel prediction publicly.
Speaker 1: Ouch.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he had to be unusually blunt. He told the
Speaker 2: people who rely on these forecasts to plan their multi
Speaker 2: billion dollar operations for years ahead. The grid managers, the
Speaker 2: satellite operators, the global airlines. He told them the twenty
Speaker 2: nineteen forecast was officially no longer reliable. The new reality
Speaker 2: called for a much quicker rise to a significantly higher peak.
Speaker 1: Okay, here's where I have to step in and push
Speaker 1: back on behalf of everyone listening, because I'm putting myself
Speaker 1: in the shoes of a logistics manager or a satellite engineer.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: We have the most advanced supercomputers on the planet. We
Speaker 1: have generations of astrophysics data. We have machine learning algorithms
Speaker 1: that can be grand masters at chess. How on Earth
Speaker 1: you miss a target by forty percent? Is our data
Speaker 1: just terrible or is the actual math governing the Sun
Speaker 1: fundamentally broken?
Speaker 2: That is the exact agonizing question that the entire field
Speaker 2: of solar physics was forced to ask themselves in the
Speaker 2: wake of this failure. Everyone knew the models had failed.
Speaker 2: I mean, the data was undeniable, right, The terrifying question
Speaker 2: was why. For forty years, the prevailing belief, the paradigm
Speaker 2: of the entire field, was that the solar dynamo, the
Speaker 2: internal engine of the Sun, was something you could, in
Speaker 2: principle model completely.
Speaker 1: Which is a math problem to solve exactly.
Speaker 2: The assumption was simply a matter of scale. If you
Speaker 2: just got better data, higher resolution telescopes, and faster computers,
Speaker 2: you could eventually predict cycle by cycle with perfect accuracy.
Speaker 1: But they couldn't.
Speaker 2: No, no, missing a target by forty percent after throwing
Speaker 2: everything you have at it forces you to ask if
Speaker 2: that kind of prediction is even physically possible, and to
Speaker 2: answer your question about whether the math is broken. We
Speaker 2: can't just look at the sun spots on the surface.
Speaker 2: We have to crack open the Sun itself. We have
Speaker 2: to look at its internal engine.
Speaker 1: Let's do it. Take us under the hood, what is
Speaker 1: actually driving this machine?
Speaker 2: To understand the engine, we have to look underneath the
Speaker 2: visible surface of the Sun into a region that makes
Speaker 2: up roughly the outer thirty percent of the star.
Speaker 1: Okay, the outer thirty percent, right.
Speaker 2: This is the convection zone. It is an incredibly violent
Speaker 2: churning layer of hot ionized gas or plasma. You have
Speaker 2: vast currents of this material constantly boiling up from the
Speaker 2: interior and sinking back down. Now, the Sun spins on
Speaker 2: its axis, just like the Earth does. But here is
Speaker 2: the critical difference that drives the entire system. The Sun
Speaker 2: does not spin as a solid.
Speaker 1: Object, right, because it's not a rigid billiard ball. It's
Speaker 1: a massive fluid ball of gas and plasma.
Speaker 2: Precisely because it's fluid, the equator of the Sun actually
Speaker 2: rotates significantly faster than the poles do.
Speaker 1: Wait, really, the middle spins faster than the top.
Speaker 2: Yes, it takes the equator about twenty five days to
Speaker 2: complete one rotation, but it takes the poles more than
Speaker 2: thirty four days.
Speaker 1: That's a huge difference.
Speaker 3: It is.
Speaker 2: Furthermore, the deep interior of the Sun rotates at a
Speaker 2: completely different, more uniform speed than the exterior convection zone.
Speaker 2: This massive disparity in speeds is called differential rotation.
Speaker 1: Okay, so you have different latitudes and different depths of
Speaker 1: the Sun, all spinning at different speeds, constantly slipping and
Speaker 1: grinding past each other.
Speaker 2: Yes, and the friction from that slipping is what generates
Speaker 2: the danger. Because this plasma isn't just normal gas, it
Speaker 2: is highly magnetized. This shearing motion literally grabs the magnetic
Speaker 2: field lines inside the star and drags.
Speaker 1: Them like physical strings being pulled.
Speaker 2: Exactly at the start of a quiet period, the magnetic
Speaker 2: field starts off in a relatively simple north south alignment,
Speaker 2: pointing from pole to pole, much like Earth's magnetic field.
Speaker 2: Physicists call this the poloidal field. The boidal got it,
Speaker 2: But that differential rotation, that constant unequal shearing takes those
Speaker 2: neat north south lines and begins to stretch them, wrap them,
Speaker 2: amplify them, and twist them into dense east west loops
Speaker 2: that wrap tightly around the Sun's equator. This twisted, compressed
Speaker 2: east west field is called the toroidal field.
Speaker 1: I love this analogy from some of the foundational research.
Speaker 1: It's like taking a giant spinning ball and wrapping massive
Speaker 1: rubber bands around it from pole to pole. Ye, But
Speaker 1: because the middle of the ball is spinning faster than
Speaker 1: the top and bottom, the rubber bands get dragged sideways.
Speaker 1: You keep spinning the ball, and the rubber bands get
Speaker 1: tighter and tighter and more twisted upon themselves, until the
Speaker 1: tension is so immense that eventually they have to snap outward.
Speaker 2: That is exactly what happens. And when those incredibly tense
Speaker 2: magnetic rubber bands snap, they don't just disappear. They push
Speaker 2: violently outward through the surface of the Sun. Those twisted
Speaker 2: loops of concentrated magnetic energy rising through the photosphere. That
Speaker 2: is what a sunspot actually is.
Speaker 1: Mind blowing.
Speaker 2: They aren't just random dark blotches on a telescope lens.
Speaker 2: They are the visible physical signatures of massive magnetic flux
Speaker 2: tubes breaking through the surface. And crucially, because they are
Speaker 2: loops of a continuous field breaking the surface and returning
Speaker 2: back down, they tend to appear in tilted pairs, with
Speaker 2: a leading spot and a following spot of opposite magnetic polarity.
Speaker 1: So a sunspot is literally the Sun's internal magnetic rubber
Speaker 1: band snapping under immense tension and bursting out into space.
Speaker 1: That is terrifying and totally awesome to visualize. But how
Speaker 1: does that mechanism lead to a predictive model. If things
Speaker 1: are just snapping randomly, where does the pattern come from?
Speaker 1: Where does the positive feedback loop that scientists tried to
Speaker 1: track come in?
Speaker 2: This brings us to a massive theoretical breakthrough from the
Speaker 2: nineteen sixties, discovered by physicists Horace Babcock and Robert Lieton.
Speaker 1: Okay, what did they find?
Speaker 2: They finally figured out how the solar cycle regenerates itself,
Speaker 2: how the machine resets. When those tilted sunspot pairs eventually
Speaker 2: decay and fade away, they do so asymmetrically. That asymmetry
Speaker 2: leaves behind a small residual magnetic field on the surface, like.
Speaker 1: Leaving a footprint behind in the mud. After the storm.
Speaker 2: Passes exactly and over the course of an eleven year
Speaker 2: cycle across thousands and thousands of sunspot groups emerging and decaying,
Speaker 2: those residual magnetic footprints begin to add up. But they
Speaker 2: don't stay at the equator. Inside the sun, there are
Speaker 2: very slow moving deep plasma flows called the meridunal circulation.
Speaker 2: Think of it like a giant planetary scale conveyor belt.
Speaker 1: A conveyor belt.
Speaker 2: Yes, this conveyor belt slowly carries those leftover magnetic footprints
Speaker 2: from the equator all the way back up toward the poles,
Speaker 2: and as they accumulate at the poles over years, they
Speaker 2: actually cancel out the old polar field and build up
Speaker 2: the new poloidal field. The north south field, which.
Speaker 1: If I'm following the physics, becomes the fresh north south
Speaker 1: rubber band, the seed for the next cycle to start
Speaker 1: twisting all over again.
Speaker 2: Yes, you've got it. This entire mechanism is known as
Speaker 2: the Babcock Laton process. It is a massive positive feedback
Speaker 2: loop with a built in delay. Each cycle literally plants
Speaker 2: the magnetic.
Speaker 3: Seed for the next Oh, that's fascinating.
Speaker 2: And the lag time, the years it takes between the
Speaker 2: sowing of that seed at the poles and the harvest
Speaker 2: of the next cycle sunspots, is what gave forecasters their hope.
Speaker 2: It gave them a seemingly reliable precursor. The logic they
Speaker 2: built their supercomputer models on was simple. If you measure
Speaker 2: the polar magnetic field at the very end of a cycle,
Speaker 2: and that field is weak, then the seed for the
Speaker 2: next cycle is weak. Therefore the next cycle must be weak.
Speaker 1: And the polar field at the end of cycle twenty four,
Speaker 1: right before cycle twenty five began, was.
Speaker 2: Weak, It was historically weak. That single overarching observation is
Speaker 2: what drove almost all of the twenty nineteen panel's confidence
Speaker 2: in forecasting a quiet cycle twenty five. The seed was small,
Speaker 2: so the tree had to be small, but.
Speaker 1: Then cycle twenty five ran forty percent stronger. So if
Speaker 1: the seed was weak, how did the plant grow so massive.
Speaker 1: If the Babcock Layton theory is right, a weak seed
Speaker 1: shouldn't be able to produce a monster cycle. Is the
Speaker 1: theory wrong.
Speaker 2: The theory isn't completely wrong, but it is missing something
Speaker 2: massive which the intrinsic inescapable noise of the system. To
Speaker 2: understand this, we have to look at the findings from
Speaker 2: Pargov Karak's twenty twenty six review on the solar dynamo
Speaker 2: and Mark Mische's twenty twenty five review in the journal
Speaker 2: Space Weather. What the field of astrophysics is now reluctantly
Speaker 2: painfully accepting is that the solar dynamo has chaos, pure
Speaker 2: unmeasurable stochastic noise build right into its very foundation.
Speaker 1: What kind of noise we're talking about, like, what specific
Speaker 1: variables are they missing that are throwing the models off
Speaker 1: by forty percent.
Speaker 2: It's the micro details that cascade into macro effects. For instance,
Speaker 2: the tilt angles of individual sunspot pairs, the footplents you
Speaker 2: mentioned exactly. The Babcock latent process assumes an average tilt,
Speaker 2: but in reality that tilt varies wildly from group to
Speaker 2: group as they bubble up through the turbulent plasma. The
Speaker 2: exact latitude where a specific flux tube decides to emerge
Speaker 2: matters immensely to how its residual field is carried away.
Speaker 1: Because it hits the conveyor belt at a different.
Speaker 2: Spot precisely, and that giant conveyor belt the meridional circulation
Speaker 2: carrying the plasma to the poles. It isn't a constant
Speaker 2: smooth machine. Carrick's review points out that these deep plasma
Speaker 2: flows drift, they speed up, they slow down, they dip
Speaker 2: into deeper convection zones where our instruments absolutely cannot see them,
Speaker 2: and then they surface again, completely altering the timing and
Speaker 2: strength of the magnetic transport.
Speaker 1: So if I'm trying to predict this, I'm trying to
Speaker 1: calculate the exact output of an engine where the gels
Speaker 1: are constantly changing size, changing speed, and physically moving around
Speaker 1: inside the casing while the machine is running a full throttle.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's an impossible math problem, and Mark Misha's twenty
Speaker 2: twenty five review takes it a step further to a
Speaker 2: deeply unsettling conclusion for anyone who likes certainty. He argues
Speaker 2: that this noise isn't just a missing variable that we
Speaker 2: can eventually measure if we just build a better satellite
Speaker 2: or a faster computer.
Speaker 1: It's permanent.
Speaker 2: The intrinsic randomness, the fluid turbulence, and the stochastic scatter,
Speaker 2: and how these flux tubes interact sets a permanent physical
Speaker 2: ceiling on prediction accuracy. His estimate, based on analyzing forty
Speaker 2: five years of continuous data, is that there is a
Speaker 2: permanent ten to twenty percent aerfloor built into solar forecasting.
Speaker 2: You cannot get past it, ever, because that ara floor
Speaker 2: is just the Sun being the Sun.
Speaker 1: Wow, So to synthesize this chaos for everyone listening, what
Speaker 1: the experts are finally admitting is that the Sun operates
Speaker 1: less like a predictable clock and much more like a
Speaker 1: hurricane season on Earth. We know fundamentally that we are
Speaker 1: going to get storms in August and September, but trying
Speaker 1: to pinpoint exactly when a specific hurricane will form and
Speaker 1: exactly what category will be three years in advance is
Speaker 1: basically impossible because of the sheer internal noise of the atmosphere.
Speaker 2: Perfect analogy.
Speaker 1: The underlying physics of the Sun is deterministic short, but
Speaker 1: the chaotic nonlinear couplings just completely outrun the initial memory
Speaker 1: of the system.
Speaker 2: That is, the exact paradigm shift much concluded was necessary.
Speaker 2: It's like trying to predict the exact swirl of cream
Speaker 2: and a cup of coffee. It's fluid mixing. Past a
Speaker 2: certain time horizon, the forecast just stop being mathematically meaningful.
Speaker 2: The Sun forgets its own history too quickly.
Speaker 1: Okay, But here's where this story gets absolutely fascinating, because
Speaker 1: while the official agencies with all the funding, were hitting
Speaker 1: this wall of intrinsic solo noise and essentially throwing their
Speaker 1: hands up, there was a small group of rogue scientists
Speaker 1: who are looking at a completely different set of signals.
Speaker 2: Oh this is my favorite part.
Speaker 1: And they nailed the cycle twenty five forecast almost perfectly.
Speaker 2: They did. While the official forecasters were learning their limits
Speaker 2: the hard way, these outliers were quietly building a completely
Speaker 2: different paradigm. We're talking specifically about Scott McIntosh, who was
Speaker 2: the deputy director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research
Speaker 2: for two decades, and Robert Lehman, a brilliant research scientist
Speaker 2: working with NASA.
Speaker 1: So what were they doing differently? If everyone else is
Speaker 1: staring at the polar magnetic field and the big sun spots,
Speaker 1: what were Macintosh and Leman looking at To get it right?
Speaker 2: They completely ignored the polar field. They threw it out,
Speaker 2: just tossed it Yep. They weren't using the standard dynamo
Speaker 2: simulations that the twenty nineteen panel relied on. Instead, they
Speaker 2: were quietly cataloging something in the Sun's extreme ultraviolet imagery
Speaker 2: that most of their colleagues had completely dismissed as unimportant
Speaker 2: background noise. They were tracking what they called bright points.
Speaker 1: Bright points. What exactly are those? Are they just tiny sunspots?
Speaker 2: No, they are fundamentally different. They are exactly what they
Speaker 2: sound like, small intensely glowing patches of extreme ultraviolet light
Speaker 2: that flare up briefly in the corona, the Sun's outer atmosphere.
Speaker 2: They might last for a few hours or maybe a
Speaker 2: few days, and then they vanish.
Speaker 1: So they're insignificant on their own.
Speaker 2: Individually, they are not impressive at all. They don't cause
Speaker 2: geomagnetic storms. There are millions of them scattered like little
Speaker 2: bright sparks across the surface during a given solar cycle.
Speaker 1: Okay, but why focus on the tiny, harmless sparks when
Speaker 1: the rest of the scientific community is correctly looking at
Speaker 1: the massive fires the sunspots that actually cause the damage.
Speaker 2: Because Macintosh and Lemon noticed something profound in the data.
Speaker 2: When you zoom out and look at the entire population
Speaker 2: of bright points together over decades, they do not behave randomly.
Speaker 2: They form incredibly distinct organized patterns like what Clusters of
Speaker 2: these bright points emerge amid latitudes early in a cycle,
Speaker 2: and then over the next two decades they marched steadily,
Speaker 2: inevitably toward the Sun's equator.
Speaker 1: It sounds almost like they are floating on a current,
Speaker 1: as if they're being carried by something massive underneath the surface.
Speaker 2: That was their exact hypothesis. The team argued that these
Speaker 2: bright points were simply the visible traces the exhaust fumes
Speaker 2: of massive bands of magnetic fields moving deep within the
Speaker 2: convection zone, and they noticed that these underlying magnetic bands
Speaker 2: drift from the poles to the equator on our roughly
Speaker 2: twenty two year clock, not an eleven year clock.
Speaker 1: Wait twenty two years. We always hear about the eleven
Speaker 1: year solar cycle. Where does twenty two years.
Speaker 2: Come from This brings us to a foundational concept known
Speaker 2: as the Hail cycle, discovered way back in nineteen oh
Speaker 2: eight by the astronomer George ellery Hale. He was the
Speaker 2: first person to realize that sunspots contained powerful magnetic fields,
Speaker 2: and he discovered that the magnetic polarities of sunspots actually
Speaker 2: flip from one eleven year.
Speaker 3: Cycle to the next, a magnetic flip.
Speaker 2: Right, So if the leading sunspots in the northern hemisphere
Speaker 2: are positively charged in cycle twenty four, they will be
Speaker 2: negatively charged in cycle twenty five. Therefore, it actually takes
Speaker 2: two full eleven year cycles, two complete magnetic flicks, to
Speaker 2: make one complete returning magnetic period.
Speaker 1: So eleven times two is twenty two exactly.
Speaker 2: Macintosh and Leemann propose that each eleven year sunspot cycle
Speaker 2: that we see is really just half of this longer,
Speaker 2: much more fundamental, twenty two year magnetic cycle playing out
Speaker 2: beneath the surface, and.
Speaker 1: The timeline there is critical. If a band takes twenty
Speaker 1: two years to march to the equator, but a sunspot
Speaker 1: cycle only lasts eleven years, that means they must overlap
Speaker 1: at any given time. There isn't just one cycle happening
Speaker 1: inside the Sun.
Speaker 2: That is the crucial paradigm shifting inside of their work.
Speaker 2: The magnetic bands from the previous cycle are still active
Speaker 2: and moving under beneath the surface at the exact same
Speaker 2: time that the bands for the current cycle are forming
Speaker 2: and moving. You have two sets of massive magnetic bands
Speaker 2: interacting deep beneath the surface of the star.
Speaker 1: Two active cycles at once.
Speaker 2: Yes, sometimes they reinforce each other, and sometimes they interfere
Speaker 2: with each other, constantly dampening the Sun's ability to produce sunspots.
Speaker 1: It's exactly like ocean waves overlapping. If the peaks of
Speaker 1: two waves align, you get a massive rogue wave. But
Speaker 1: if the peak of one wave meets the trough of another,
Speaker 1: they cancel each other out entirely and the water stays flat.
Speaker 2: That is a brilliant way to visualize magnetic interference, and
Speaker 2: this brings us to the dramatic climax of their theory.
Speaker 2: Every couple of decades, something spectacular happens. The old interfering
Speaker 2: magnetic bands from the northern and southern hemispheres, carrying opposite
Speaker 2: magnetic polarities finally meet at the Sun's equator. And when
Speaker 2: opposite magnetic fields meet, they don't just bounce off each other,
Speaker 2: they annihilate each other in a massive flash.
Speaker 1: And Macintosh and Lehman called this moment the terminator event.
Speaker 2: Yes, the terminator. When those old bands annihilate each other
Speaker 2: at the equator, all the bright points connected to that
Speaker 2: old cycle vanish entirely, sometimes within a matter of weeks.
Speaker 2: The terminator event is the exact moment the old magnetic
Speaker 2: cycle truly dies. And because that old interfering cycle is
Speaker 2: suddenly gone, the new cycle is released from its magnetic chains.
Speaker 2: It can finally explode into action without any magnetic interference
Speaker 2: holding it back.
Speaker 1: That is such a vivid, almost cinematic picture of astrophysics.
Speaker 1: Two slow motion magnetic ropes wrapping around a start drifting
Speaker 1: toward each other for twenty years, and then they finally
Speaker 1: touch the equator and just vanish, releasing a tidal wave
Speaker 1: of new energy. So when did the last terminator event happen?
Speaker 2: The most recent terminator event happen in December twenty twenty one.
Speaker 2: Macintosh and Lemon had been obsessively watching the bright points
Speaker 2: tracking their march to the equator, and they knew it
Speaker 2: was coming and when it finally arrived in December twenty
Speaker 2: twenty one. They use the exact spacing the precise amount
Speaker 2: of time between that terminator event and the previous one
Speaker 2: as their main mathematical input to make a rival prediction
Speaker 2: for cycle twenty five.
Speaker 1: And what was their number? Remember the official supercomputer panel
Speaker 1: said one fifteen? What did the terminator model say?
Speaker 2: Using the terminator method, they predicted that cycle twenty five
Speaker 2: would peak at a massive sunspot number close to one
Speaker 2: eighty four, and they said it would arrive early sometime
Speaker 2: around early twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1: Wow. Okay, so let's put those numbers side by side
Speaker 1: so the listener can really feel the gap. Here, the
Speaker 1: official twenty nineteen consensus panel, using all the billion dollars
Speaker 1: supercomputers fifty models in polar field data, predicted a weak
Speaker 1: peak of one hundred and fifteen in mid twenty twenty five.
Speaker 1: Macintosh and Lehman, two guys using the rogue terminator method
Speaker 1: and tracking bright points, predicted a massive one eighty four
Speaker 1: in early twenty twenty four, and reality delivered a peak
Speaker 1: of one hundred and fifty six point seven in August
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four. They were incredibly close They completely left
Speaker 1: the twenty nineteen panel in the dust. They caught the
Speaker 1: early timing, and they caught the massive amplitude trend.
Speaker 2: They really did. It was a stunning vindication of the
Speaker 2: robservational method and a massive shop to the traditional model
Speaker 2: in community.
Speaker 1: Okay, but hold on. Here is where I have to
Speaker 1: play the skeptic, because this is almost too neat. A
Speaker 1: couple of rogue scientists looking at bright spots beat the
Speaker 1: billion dollar supercomputers. That sounds like a Hollywood script, which
Speaker 1: usually means it's too good to be true. Did they
Speaker 1: just get mathematically lucky? I mean, why hasn't NOAA completely
Speaker 1: adopted this terminator model if it works so well. Is
Speaker 1: the scientific establishment just being stubborn and protective of their
Speaker 1: old models, or is there a genuine hard science flaw
Speaker 1: in relying on these bright points.
Speaker 2: It's an excellent question, and it's a bit of both. Honestly,
Speaker 2: it is a massive paradigm clash in astrophysics right now.
Speaker 2: The twenty nineteen panel forecasters didn't just concede, defeat, throw
Speaker 2: out their life's work and adopt the terminator model. Debiando Nandi,
Speaker 2: the astrophysicist whose dynamo work fed heavily into that failed
Speaker 2: twenty nineteen prediction. Has been highly publicly skeptical of the
Speaker 2: terminator theory, so he's pushing back hard. He simply does
Speaker 2: not accept the underlying physics of it. He argues that
Speaker 2: the timing between these terminator events cannot mathematically causally predict
Speaker 2: the strength of the next cycle.
Speaker 1: So he thinks they just got lucky with the data
Speaker 1: points they chose.
Speaker 2: Essentially, yes, he argues it's an empirical correlation, not a
Speaker 2: physical causation, though he does concede importantly that the bright
Speaker 2: points are signaling something real about the underlying magnetic field
Speaker 2: that the standard Babcock Late and models are entirely missing.
Speaker 1: Okay, so it's a piece of the puzzle.
Speaker 2: Right, But NAA has not folded the terminator method into
Speaker 2: operational forecasting. They are incredibly hesitant to base global infrastructure
Speaker 2: warnings on a model that lacks a fully fleshed out
Speaker 2: interior mathematical dynamo simulation to back it up. When asked
Speaker 2: about it, Macintosh basically said he expects the agencies to
Speaker 2: just stubbornly stick to their existing approaches because it's what
Speaker 2: they know.
Speaker 1: But the implications of this debate are wild. If the
Speaker 1: official models are looking at the polar field on the
Speaker 1: surface and the terminator method is looking at overlapping bands
Speaker 1: of magnetic cycles deep beneath the surface, does that mean
Speaker 1: the Sun is literally doing two completely different things at
Speaker 1: the same time.
Speaker 2: That is the exact mind bending conclusion that the field
Speaker 2: is moving toward the Sun may be operating on multiple
Speaker 2: interacting layers, And for forty years we have only been
Speaker 2: watching the top layer. Our picture of the Sun has
Speaker 2: been fundamentally incomplete. We've been trying to predict the ocean's
Speaker 2: currents by only looking at the foam on the waves.
Speaker 1: So we have this massive debate over which mathematical model
Speaker 1: is right. But let's bring this back down to earth.
Speaker 1: Why does this debate actually matter to you and me?
Speaker 1: Why should the average person care about bright points and
Speaker 1: magnetic bands? Well, because this isn't just an academic astrophysics
Speaker 1: debate happening in a university hallway. When the official forecast fails,
Speaker 1: the modern technological infrastructure we literally rely on to run
Speaker 1: our society falls out of the sky.
Speaker 2: It is not an exaggeration. The gap between what the
Speaker 2: scientists can safely predict and What the chaotic Sun is
Speaker 2: actually doing is incredibly dangerous, and the severe it can
Speaker 2: and structural consequences of getting it wrong have already started arriving.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about the invisible threat to lower th orbit.
Speaker 1: Bring us to April twenty five, twenty twenty four, because
Speaker 1: this crisis didn't start with a massive cinematic explosion that
Speaker 1: started really quietly.
Speaker 2: Didn't it very quietly? It was an ordinary week in
Speaker 2: space operations. Around April twenty five, telemetry data showed that
Speaker 2: twelve Starlink satellites and lower th orbit suddenly started losing altitude.
Speaker 2: They were dropping faster than their orbital mechanics and standard
Speaker 2: drag calculations said they should be.
Speaker 1: Were there flares happening.
Speaker 2: No. At the time, there was no major headline grabbing
Speaker 2: geomagnetic storm in progress. The Sun was throwing off some
Speaker 2: moderate flares, but nothing out of the ordinary for an
Speaker 2: active cycle. But the upper atmosphere was already secretly responding
Speaker 2: to the increased ultraviolet output of the cycle.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I need to stop you here because I think
Speaker 1: a lot of people have the same misconception I did.
Speaker 1: Space is a vacuum, right, There is no air, So
Speaker 1: if the Sun releases a solar flare. How does that
Speaker 1: physically cause a satellite to fall. It's not like the
Speaker 1: light can push a five hundred pounds satellite out of orbit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the only way that makes sense is if the Earth's
Speaker 1: atmosphere is actually expanding upward into space to grab it.
Speaker 1: Is that what's happening.
Speaker 2: That is exactly what is happening, and the mechanism is fascinating.
Speaker 2: Space is a vacuum, yes, but low Earth orbit, where
Speaker 2: Starlink and many other constellations operate, is not a perfect vacuum.
Speaker 2: There is a very very thin, highly tenuous layer of
Speaker 2: gas there called.
Speaker 1: The thermae thermosphere. Okay.
Speaker 2: When the Sun emits elevated extreme ultraviolet radiation, or when
Speaker 2: the edge of a geomagnetic storm hits our magnetic field,
Speaker 2: massive electrical currents are induced and flow down into the
Speaker 2: upper atmosphere. This dumps a staggering amount of electrical energy
Speaker 2: into the sparse oxygen and nitrogen molecules up there. This
Speaker 2: process is called jewel heating.
Speaker 1: Jewel heating, Okay, So we are dumping electricity into gas, okay,
Speaker 1: like a toaster wire heating.
Speaker 2: Up exactly the electrical resistance of the gas causes it
Speaker 2: to heat up rapidly, and basic thermodynamics tells us that
Speaker 2: when you heat agains, it expands. The entire thermosphere begins
Speaker 2: to expand outward, inflating like a giant balloon over a
Speaker 2: hot stove.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: It pushes denser air from lower down up to much
Speaker 2: higher altitudes. So a Starling satellite that is gliding along
Speaker 2: effortlessly at seventeen thousand miles an hour through what it
Speaker 2: thinks is a near vacuum suddenly unexpectedly hits a wall
Speaker 2: of much thicker, denser gas. Drag, which was previously negligible,
Speaker 2: suddenly becomes a massive physical force that the satellite has
Speaker 2: to fight against or else it loses velocity and falls.
Speaker 1: And these twelve Starling satellites were feeling that exact drag
Speaker 1: in April. There's this one specific example from the tracking
Speaker 1: data that highlights how fast this happens, Starling twenty six
Speaker 1: oh one.
Speaker 2: Yes, according to vital tracking work led by researcher Denny
Speaker 2: olivera Starling twenty six oh one fell from a safe
Speaker 2: altitude of two hundred and seventy six kilometers down to
Speaker 2: a completely doomed altitude of just one hundred kilometers in
Speaker 2: under two days.
Speaker 1: In two days, its.
Speaker 2: Fiery re entry into the atmosphere happened eleven days earlier
Speaker 2: than the operator operational models had predicted eleven days.
Speaker 1: If you were a satellite operator, eleven days is an
Speaker 1: absolute eternity. You need pinpoint precision to plan collision avoidance
Speaker 1: maneuvers with other satellites and to schedule controlled the orbits
Speaker 1: so de breed doesn't hit populated areas. If you lose
Speaker 1: eleven days of forecasting because the sun breathed on the atmosphere,
Speaker 1: you are essentially flying blind at hypersonic speeds. And the
Speaker 1: crazy thing is this wasn't an isolated incident, right We
Speaker 1: actually had a massive warning about this specific vulnerability back
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty two that we mostly ignored.
Speaker 2: We did. We had a very expensive dress rehearsal. In
Speaker 2: February twenty twenty two, SpaceX launched a batch of forty
Speaker 2: nine Starlink satellites. They launched them during what forecasters thought
Speaker 2: was a relatively minor moderate geomagnetic storm and a moderate
Speaker 2: storm right now. Because Starlink uses a deliberately low staging altitude.
Speaker 2: The idea is that if a satellite is a dut
Speaker 2: upon deployment, it burns up quickly rather than becoming dangerous
Speaker 2: space drunk for decades. They are incredibly acutely vulnerable to
Speaker 2: any in thermospheric expansion. Because of that moderate storm, the
Speaker 2: jewel heating was so intense and the atmospheric drag increased
Speaker 2: so sharply that thirty eight of those forty nine brand
Speaker 2: new satellites never reached their final orbit. Oh my god,
Speaker 2: the thrusters couldn't overcome the friction. They were dragged backward
Speaker 2: into the denser atmosphere and burned up in a streak
Speaker 2: of fire.
Speaker 1: Research by space weather expert Thomas Berger documented the entire fiasco.
Speaker 1: It was a fifty million dollar hardware loss in a
Speaker 1: single event caused by a moderate storm, and the overarching
Speaker 1: scale of this atmospheric drag is staggering. The sources note
Speaker 1: that between twenty twenty and twenty twenty four and nearly
Speaker 1: twelve hundred satellites re entered from very low Earth orbit,
Speaker 1: and nearly half of them were starlinks. The orbital infrastructure
Speaker 1: we are building is acutely physically vulnerable to the Sun,
Speaker 1: and that was all before the real monster arrived. The
Speaker 1: April orbital decay was just the appetizer exactly.
Speaker 2: The April twenty twenty four drag was just the thermosphere
Speaker 2: warming up its muscles. Two weeks later, the main event
Speaker 2: hit the planet May eighth, twenty twenty four. The Gannon Storm,
Speaker 2: yes highly complex magnetically tangled sun spot region designated by
Speaker 2: NAA as Region one three sixty sixty four, rotated into
Speaker 2: view across the face of the Sun. It looked like
Speaker 2: a bruised, angry nod of magnetic tension, and it began
Speaker 2: firing off massive X class flares and rapid succession. Within
Speaker 2: just nine days, the sunspat region grew so aggressively that
Speaker 2: it covered fourteen times the surface area of the Earth.
Speaker 1: Fourteen times the Earth unbelievable.
Speaker 2: It was an absolute monster, and it didn't just flashlight
Speaker 2: at us. It launched several massive coronal mass ejections or CMEs,
Speaker 2: directly at Earth.
Speaker 1: A CME is when the Sun literally vomits a billion
Speaker 1: tons of plasma and embedded magnetic field out into the
Speaker 1: Solar system right and these specific CMEs, they didn't just
Speaker 1: follow each other nicely in a line, they merged.
Speaker 2: This is a terrifying phenomenon in space weather called a
Speaker 2: cannibal CME.
Speaker 1: Cannibal CME.
Speaker 2: Yeah, when the Sun fires off a slow CME and
Speaker 2: then a day later fires off a much faster one
Speaker 2: behind it. The faster one catches up through the physics
Speaker 2: of magnetic reconnection, where the magnetic fields of the two
Speaker 2: a few plasmic clouds crash into each other and reconfigure.
Speaker 2: The faster CME literally swallows the slower one up. They
Speaker 2: merge into a single monstrous wave of dense plasma and
Speaker 2: compressed magnetic field. The combined force of this cannibal cloud
Speaker 2: hits Earth significantly harder than any individual eruption would. This
Speaker 2: specific cannibal CME from Region one three six sixty four
Speaker 2: slammed into Earth's magnetosphere at well over one thousand kilometers
Speaker 2: per second.
Speaker 1: Over one thousand kilometers a second. Just trying to fathom
Speaker 1: that speed is dizzying. And the result of that impact
Speaker 1: was a G five storm.
Speaker 2: A G five that is the absolute highest rung on
Speaker 2: the geomagnetic storm scale. It was the first event of
Speaker 2: that extreme severity to hit Earth since the infamous Halloween
Speaker 2: storms of October two thousand and three. The scientific community
Speaker 2: unofficially named it the Gannon Storm, honoring Jennifer Lee Gannon,
Speaker 2: a brilliant space weather physicist who had tragically passed away
Speaker 2: just days earlier.
Speaker 1: What a beautiful and haunting tribute to her work. And visually,
Speaker 1: for those of us on the ground, this storm was undeniable, well,
Speaker 1: I mean paid the picture for us. This wasn't just
Speaker 1: a squiggly line reading on a dial in the laboratory.
Speaker 2: The visual payoff of that energy dumping into our atmosphere
Speaker 2: was extraordinary. Auroras were visible in places where they hadn't
Speaker 2: been seen for generations, in some cases since the eighteen
Speaker 2: fifty nine Carrington event. They lit up the night sky
Speaker 2: over central Mexico. They were seen in Florida, South Africa,
Speaker 2: Southern Italy, Spain, Japan. People stepping out onto their porches
Speaker 2: in Florida were watching the northern horizon turn a deep
Speaker 2: blood red. It became one of the most extensively documented
Speaker 2: auroral events in human history, purely because suddenly billions of
Speaker 2: citizen scientists had high definition smartphone cameras in their pockets,
Speaker 2: capturing the sky on fire.
Speaker 1: But the breathtaking beauty in the sky completely masked the
Speaker 1: chaos that was unfolding on the ground. Because this storm
Speaker 1: didn't just affect low Earth orbit or make pretty lights,
Speaker 1: It physically slammed into our terrestrial infrastructure. Let's look at agriculture.
Speaker 1: What exactly happened to the American Midwest.
Speaker 2: This is a prime example of how deeply interconnected and
Speaker 2: fragile our modern technology really is. Modern agriculture isn't just
Speaker 2: a farmer with a plow anymore. It relies heavily on
Speaker 2: precision GPS to guide massive tractors for planting seeds with
Speaker 2: centimeter level accuracy to maximize yield. But during a severe
Speaker 2: geomagnetic storm, the ionosphere, the charged layer of our upper atmosphere,
Speaker 2: becomes severely disturbed. It becomes turbulent. It acts like a
Speaker 2: funhouse mirror for the radio frequencies coming down from the
Speaker 2: GPS satellites, refracting and smearing the timing of the signals.
Speaker 2: This is known as ionospheric scintillation.
Speaker 1: And GPS relies entirely on nanosecond precision. Right. It calculates
Speaker 1: your position by measuring exactly how long a radio wave
Speaker 1: takes to reach.
Speaker 2: You from space, exactly if the ionosphere bends that radio
Speaker 2: wave or delays it by even a fraction of a microsecond,
Speaker 2: the math breaks down entirely. During the gannonstorm, GPS guide
Speaker 2: detractors planting corn and soybeans in the Midwest suddenly began
Speaker 2: veering wildly off course. The navigation systems were utterly confused.
Speaker 2: A fascinating twenty twenty five step by researcher Yudin Yang
Speaker 2: tracked global outages of fifteen to twenty hours in precise
Speaker 2: positioning solutions. Twenty hours without GPS, farmers were forced to
Speaker 2: completely abandon their fields in the middle of an already
Speaker 2: weather delayed planting season because their tractors literally didn't know
Speaker 2: where they were. Russian stations in North America lost positioning
Speaker 2: data for fifteen hours, stations in Australia lost it for
Speaker 2: twenty hours. Global agriculture just ground to a halt.
Speaker 1: So we understand the sky's expanding and the ionosphere is
Speaker 1: grambling radio signals, But what about the physical grid on
Speaker 1: the ground. How does a magnetic disturbance in space physically
Speaker 1: reach down and break a piece of heavy metal on
Speaker 1: the ground in New Zealand.
Speaker 2: That is the most dangerous part of a G five storm.
Speaker 2: The massive fluctuating magnetic disturbance in the atmosphere induces enormous
Speaker 2: electrical currents in the physical ground beneath our feet. These
Speaker 2: are called geomagnetically induced currents or GICs. Now, the earth
Speaker 2: itself has resistance, so these massive ground currents seek out
Speaker 2: the path of lease resistance to travel, which happens to
Speaker 2: be our long continuous high voltage.
Speaker 3: Transmission line power grid.
Speaker 2: Right at the Halfway Bush substation near Dunad in New Zealand,
Speaker 2: these rogue direct currents flooded up from the ground and
Speaker 2: into the alternating current grid. They pushed the massive iron
Speaker 2: cores of the high voltage transformers into a state that
Speaker 2: electrical engineers call half cycle saturation.
Speaker 1: Half cycle saturation. Yeah, that sounds like engine failure on
Speaker 1: a starship. Help me visualize this. Imagine the power grid
Speaker 1: is a giant water pumping system moving water back and forth.
Speaker 1: What does half cycle saturation actually due to the pump?
Speaker 1: Is it like the water violently slashing backward instead of
Speaker 1: flowing smoothly.
Speaker 2: That's a fantastic analogy. A transformer relies on smooth alternating
Speaker 2: magnetic flups to transfer alternating current the water smoothly slashing
Speaker 2: back and forth. But when this massive direct current from
Speaker 2: the spacetorm floods in it acts like a physical block,
Speaker 2: pushing the pump entirely to one side. The iron core
Speaker 2: literally cannot hold any more magnetic flux in that direction
Speaker 2: it is saturated, So for half of the alternating cycle,
Speaker 2: the transformer stops behaving like a clean, efficient pump. Instead,
Speaker 2: the water violently slams into a wall. The transformer starts
Speaker 2: drawing massive amounts of what's called reactive power from the grid,
Speaker 2: creating huge thermal spikes, literally melting the internal insulation and
Speaker 2: sending chaotic harmonic distortions or pressure waves rippling back through
Speaker 2: the network.
Speaker 1: So the transformer is basically choking, velting and sending shockwaves
Speaker 1: through the rest of the grid precisely.
Speaker 2: Mark Cloverd and his team measured this specific incident in
Speaker 2: New Zealand, and their conclusions were chilling. They found that
Speaker 2: if an event on the scale of the eighteen fifty
Speaker 2: nine Carrington event hit today, New Zealand would instantly need
Speaker 2: hundreds of additional megavolt ampers of generation just to feed
Speaker 2: that reactive power demand and keep the grid from collapsing
Speaker 2: entirely in a cascade failure. And New Zealand wasn't alone
Speaker 2: high voltage lines tripped offline in the US to protect themselves,
Speaker 2: and power grids in Uruguay, which happen to sit under
Speaker 2: a particularly weak point in Earth's magnetic shield known as
Speaker 2: the South Atlantic Anomaly, were found to be severely vulnerable.
Speaker 1: We built our entire modern glasshouse, the mega constellations of
Speaker 1: low Earth orbit satellites, the precision GPS farming that feeds
Speaker 1: the world, the global smartphone supply chains that rely on
Speaker 1: centimeter accurate timing. We built all of this intricate, delicate
Speaker 1: infrastructure during a historical periods when the sun wasn't throwing
Speaker 1: heavy stones.
Speaker 2: We got complacent.
Speaker 1: The twenty nineteen official forecast essentially gave us the green light.
Speaker 1: It told us we were safe to keep building our glasshouse.
Speaker 1: But now the rocks are flying.
Speaker 2: And this is the most critical point to understand about
Speaker 2: the vulnerability of our era. The gannonstorm wasn't historically extreme
Speaker 2: if you look at the grand timeline of the last
Speaker 2: two hundred years. It was serious, yes, but not unprecedented.
Speaker 2: What made it so incredibly disruptive and costly was that
Speaker 2: it hit a technological infrastructure that is vastly more exposed, dense,
Speaker 2: and fragile than it was even twenty one years ago
Speaker 2: during the two thousand ti three Halloween storms.
Speaker 1: Right, the world is different now.
Speaker 2: In two thousand and three, we didn't have six thousand
Speaker 2: starling satellites relying on the sermosphere. We didn't have AI
Speaker 2: driven agriculture relying on GPS. The target on our back
Speaker 2: is exponentially larger now.
Speaker 1: And if you were listening to this thinking wow, the
Speaker 1: Gannon storm in May twenty twenty four was a crazy,
Speaker 1: once in a lifetime grand finale to Cycle twenty five,
Speaker 1: you need to seriously brace yourself because the very latest
Speaker 1: data says we have just entered the absolute most dangerous
Speaker 1: phase of the cycle.
Speaker 2: That's right, the hurricane season is not over. It is peaking.
Speaker 2: In a May twenty twenty six update, and oaa's Mark
Speaker 2: Meiche confirmed that while cycle twenty five likely reached its
Speaker 2: absolute sun spot peak in late twenty twenty four, the
Speaker 2: active phase, the agonizing stretch where major planet rattling CMEs
Speaker 2: are most likely to erupt, is dragging on far far
Speaker 2: longer than the twenty nineteen predictions ever assumed. The Sun
Speaker 2: is still firmly in its violent hurricane season, and.
Speaker 1: We have the receipts through it. The Sun didn go
Speaker 1: back to sleep. Let's talk about November eleven, twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2: Yes, Active Region forty two seventy four erupted with an
Speaker 2: X five point one flare. It was the most powerful
Speaker 2: flare of that entire year, triggering severe geomagnetic watch notices globally.
Speaker 2: Once again, aroars were pushed incredibly far south down into
Speaker 2: Texas and Mexico. The radio blackouts were intense. It was
Speaker 2: the strongest most disruptive event Sincecannon.
Speaker 1: And then just two months later January twenty twenty six,
Speaker 1: this is the event that sounds like it completely broke
Speaker 1: the textbooks for observers.
Speaker 2: It truly did. The Sun launched a coronal mass ejection
Speaker 2: that crossed the one hundred and fifty million kilometers between
Speaker 2: the Sun and the Earth in just twenty five hours.
Speaker 1: Twenty five hours, I need context for that. Normally, when
Speaker 1: a CM erupts, that transit across base takes what two
Speaker 1: or three.
Speaker 2: Full days exactly, a standard CME takes about forty eight
Speaker 2: to seventy two hours to reach Earth. To cross that
Speaker 2: immense distance in just twenty five hours means the massive
Speaker 2: plasma was moving at an absolutely terrifying speed, driven by
Speaker 2: an eruption of unimaginable force, and when it finally hit
Speaker 2: the Earth's magnetic field, it produced something that most modern
Speaker 2: space weather researchers had never personally witnessed, bizarre violently pulsing
Speaker 2: green proton auroras.
Speaker 1: Okay, why green proton aurors? Tell me the physics there?
Speaker 1: Because normally auroras are caused by electrons, right, what is
Speaker 1: the difference?
Speaker 2: Standard auroras are indeed caused when electrons from the solar
Speaker 2: wind ride our magnetic field lines down into the atmosphere
Speaker 2: and collide with oxygen atoms, making them glow. But a
Speaker 2: CME moving this fast, carrying this much energy actually accelerates
Speaker 2: heavy protons the nuclei of hydrogen atoms to immense speeds.
Speaker 1: Protons are much heavier.
Speaker 2: When these heavy charged protons slam into the atmosphere, they
Speaker 2: penetrate much deeper than electrons can. They collide with different
Speaker 2: concentrations of oxygen atoms at lower altitudes, exciting them in
Speaker 2: a very specific way that emits a stark textbook defying
Speaker 2: green wavelength. The textbooks have barely begun to describe the
Speaker 2: complex plasma physics of these specific pulsing proton auroral patterns.
Speaker 2: It was completely unprecedented. For the visual observers on the ground,
Speaker 2: It was like the sky was glitching.
Speaker 1: Okay, so why is this happening now? This is the
Speaker 1: million dollar question. If the actual sunspot peak was all
Speaker 1: the way back in twenty twenty four, why are we
Speaker 1: getting these massive, anomalist record breaking storms in twenty twenty
Speaker 1: five and twenty twenty six.
Speaker 2: We have to bring Robert Lehman back into the story here.
Speaker 2: Remember he was one of the rogue scientists looking at
Speaker 2: the twenty two year Hail magnetic cycle. He points out
Speaker 2: a fascinating, terrifying pattern in the historical data regarding odd
Speaker 2: numbered cycles exactly like our current cycle twenty five.
Speaker 1: What happens during an odd cycle that makes it different
Speaker 1: from an even cycle like twenty four.
Speaker 2: It comes back to the magnetic flip. After the Sun's
Speaker 2: magnetic field flips at the peak of the cycle, the
Speaker 2: new dominant polarity of the solar wind in an odd
Speaker 2: numbered cycle aligns perfectly with Earth's own magnetic field.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, So it's like lining up two bar magnets
Speaker 1: where the north and south poles attract locking together instead
Speaker 1: of repelling each other.
Speaker 2: Precisely, Earth's magnetic field points north during the declining phase
Speaker 2: of an odd cycle, the Sun's interplanetary magnetic field often
Speaker 2: points south. When a southbound solar field hits our northbound field,
Speaker 2: they magnetically link up. Because the polarities attract and a ligne,
Speaker 2: the solar wind couples far far more efficiently with our magnetosphere.
Speaker 2: It basically opens a literal door in our magnetic shield.
Speaker 2: The energy transfer is much stronger, meaning the CMEs that
Speaker 2: do hit us dump vastly more energy into our atmosphere.
Speaker 1: And Lemon calls this specific phase the battle zone.
Speaker 2: Yes, he argues, using decades of hail cycle data that
Speaker 2: for odd cycles, the absolute biggest, most devastating geomagnetic storms
Speaker 2: don't actually happen during the maximum sunspot peak. They happen
Speaker 2: after the peak, during this dangerous period of magnetic polarity
Speaker 2: alignment that puts US squarely unavoidably in the battle zone
Speaker 2: right now through twenty twenty five, twenty twenty six, and
Speaker 2: well into twenty twenty seven. The Gannon Storm and the
Speaker 2: November twenty twenty five events they weren't the grand finale
Speaker 2: of cycle twenty five. They were just the early arrivals.
Speaker 2: The worst may still be on its way.
Speaker 1: So I have a direct, incredibly serious question for you.
Speaker 1: If odd cycle perfectly aligned with Earth to cause maximum damage,
Speaker 1: and we are currently sitting right in the middle of
Speaker 1: this battle zone, and we have exponentially more satellites in
Speaker 1: low Earth orbit than we did just five years ago,
Speaker 1: are we essentially playing Russian Roulette with the global Internet
Speaker 1: and the power grid right now? Are we just pulling
Speaker 1: the trigger and hoping the chamber is empty?
Speaker 2: The short, uncomfortable answer is yes. The immutable physical reality
Speaker 2: of the upper atmosphere is deeply dangerously incompatible with the
Speaker 2: economic incentives of proliferating lower Earth orbit constellations. Right now,
Speaker 2: satellite companies are incentivized to launch as many units as
Speaker 2: cheaply and as low as possible. But Mark Misha's twenty
Speaker 2: twenty five review left the entire field with a very
Speaker 2: dark reality. The level of precision the satellite industry demands today,
Speaker 2: the ability to tell a starlink operator three years in
Speaker 2: advance exactly when to delay launch to avoid atmospheric drag,
Speaker 2: may simply be beyond what the chaotic physics of the
Speaker 2: solar dynamo will ever allow we cannot predict the turbulence.
Speaker 2: So yes, we are rolling the dice every single time
Speaker 2: a major cme leaves the Sun, which.
Speaker 1: Brings us to the big picture of this entire discussion,
Speaker 1: zooming out from the immediate danger of this battle zone,
Speaker 1: this whole saga with Cycle twenty five, the failed supercomputer models,
Speaker 1: the rogue terminator theory, the falling satellites, the terrified farmers,
Speaker 1: It forces a deep philosophical realization about our place in
Speaker 1: the universe. Predicting the Sun is an exercise in extreme humility.
Speaker 2: It truly is. And you can see that humility and
Speaker 2: how the agencies are acting now. We are currently staring
Speaker 2: down the barrel of Cycle twenty six, which is estimated
Speaker 2: to begin sometime between January twenty twenty nine and December
Speaker 2: twenty thirty two. And do you know what the official
Speaker 2: consensus prediction for the strength of Cycle twenty six is?
Speaker 1: Let me guess there isn't one? Is there?
Speaker 2: There isn't. After getting burned so badly by their arrogant
Speaker 2: confidence in Cycle twenty five, NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center
Speaker 2: explicitly refuses to publish a consensus prediction for the strength
Speaker 2: of Cycle twenty six. No one in the agency is
Speaker 2: in a hurry to put a hard number on it.
Speaker 2: They have been thoroughly humbled by the star they study, and.
Speaker 1: That gets right to the heart of the scale crisis
Speaker 1: we are dealing with as a species. The Sun has
Speaker 1: been generating sunspot cycles, twisting its magnetic fields, and refining
Speaker 1: its chaotic internal dynamo for four and a half billion years.
Speaker 1: It has been doing this across hundreds of millions of
Speaker 1: years of slow majestic stellar evolution.
Speaker 2: And our data what do we have to combat that
Speaker 2: four point five billion year history. We have crude sunspot
Speaker 2: count records going back to Galileo in the seventeenth century,
Speaker 2: but the detailed, reliable polar magnetic field measurements that the
Speaker 2: twenty nineteen supercomputer panel relied so heavily on, we only
Speaker 2: have three or four cycles worth of that high fidelity data.
Speaker 2: Even the terminator method, as brilliant and predictive as it
Speaker 2: has been, has precisely measured maybe two terminator events with
Speaker 2: the extreme ultraviolet instruments they actually need. We are looking
Speaker 2: at a fraction of a fraction of a second in
Speaker 2: the Sun's life.
Speaker 1: So the core takeaway here isn't that the models were
Speaker 1: stupid or that the scientists were bad at their jobs.
Speaker 1: The forecast didn't fail because the Sun suddenly maliciously changed
Speaker 1: its behavior to spite us. The forecast failed because humanity,
Speaker 1: in our incredible technological hubris, tried to decode a four
Speaker 1: point five billion year old chaotic system using only a
Speaker 1: few decades of high fidelity data. The star above our
Speaker 1: heads is doing things we don't fully understand, driven by
Speaker 1: noise and turbulence that we cannot measure on a timescale
Speaker 1: that entirely ignores our recent technological advancements. The universe doesn't
Speaker 1: care that we just invented GPS, or that we need
Speaker 1: low Earth orbit internet to trade stocks and watch movies.
Speaker 2: Exactly, The blood red auroras over Mexico during the Genin
Speaker 2: storm weren't an anomaly. They were a blindingly bright, beautiful
Speaker 2: reminder of exactly who is in charge in this solar system.
Speaker 2: The Sun dictates the terms of our existence. The next
Speaker 2: massive storm is already on its way. It's just a
Speaker 2: matter of when the magnetic band snap. Whether our models
Speaker 2: will see it coming in time to save our infrastructure
Speaker 2: is an entirely different story.
Speaker 1: And that brings us to the end of our journey today.
Speaker 1: But before we sign off, I want to turn this
Speaker 1: over to you, the listener. We spent this time talking
Speaker 1: about the incredibly fragile, intricate web of technology we've woven
Speaker 1: around our planet, knowing that our entire modern infrastructure, from
Speaker 1: the microsecond precision of the GPS and your tractor or
Speaker 1: your phone to the thousands of satellites flying right over
Speaker 1: your head, hangs in a delicate balance with a four
Speaker 1: point five billion year old chaotic star. Do you think
Speaker 1: we are moving too recklessly with mega constellations like Starlink?
Speaker 1: Should we halt these massive launches until we actually understand
Speaker 1: the solar dynamo? Or on the flip side, is this
Speaker 1: immense vulnerability and occasional catastrophic loss just the necessary painful
Speaker 1: cost of humanity stepping up to become a true resilient
Speaker 1: space faring civilization. What is your stand? Are we moving
Speaker 1: too fast or just fast enough? Leave a combat below
Speaker 1: and let us know what you think.
Speaker 2: It is the most critical infrastructure question of our decade,
Speaker 2: and one we are going to have to answer very
Speaker 2: soon before the Sun answers it for us.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for joining us for this exploration
Speaker 1: on Thrilling Threads River to sand Castle on the beach.
Speaker 1: The tide is definitely coming in and the ocean is
Speaker 1: playing by its own rules. Stay curious, stay informed, and
Speaker 1: we'll see next time.