Science: Sun Storm

Radio programs faded last week. Long-distance telephone conversations gurgled. Telegrams stuttered along the wires. Ships’ compasses jiggled. And the Northern Lights flapped like curtains in a storm. It all reflected, said Dr. A. G. McNish, authority on the earth’s magnetism, in Washington last week for a meeting of the American Geophysical Union, the worst magnetic storm in a century. This in turn was due to a great magnetic storm which swept across the face of the sun four days earlier and sent a gust of electric corpuscles toward the earth at 270 mi. per sec. Such violent sun storms will probably recur every 27 days (time for the sun to revolve once) until some time in 1939. That year will mark a height of solar activity which recurs every 23 years.

Up spoke Astrophysicist Charles Greeley Abbot of the Smithsonian Institution to predict that droughts on earth will cease with 1939’s storms on the sun. Said he: “A double solar cycle of 46 years appears to be particularly important in precipitation. We seem justified in expecting a severe recurrence of droughts following the year 1975.”