Carol Mackay Mertz

THE SUN IN SOLAR MINIMUM THE EARTH IN STILLNESS THE HUMAN IN DISCOVERY

An event happened on earth this past Monday, June 23, 2020. The sun is blank, meaning no sun spots, and there are no geomagnetic storms coming from the sun. For thirty minutes Stuart Green of the UK recorded Monday’s disturbance on his magnetometer.

He wasn’t the only one who noticed. In the Lofoten islands of Norway, Rob Stammes detected a similar anomaly on his magnetometer. “It was remarkable,” he says. “Our magnetic field swung back and forth by about 1/3rd of a degree. I also detected ground currents with the same 10 minute period.”

From around the planet this magnetic anomaly was recorded on magnetometers.

What happened? Space physicists call this phenomenon a “pulsation continuous” or “Pc” for short. Imagine blowing across a piece of paper, making it flutter with your breath. Solar wind can have a similar effect on magnetic fields. Pc waves are essentially flutters propagating down the flanks of Earth’s magnetosphere excited by the breath of the sun. During more active phases of the solar cycle, these flutters are easily lost in the noise of rambunctious geomagnetic activity. But during the extreme quiet of Solar Minimum, such waves can make themselves “heard” like a pin dropping in an silent room. (chart and information in italics from space weather.com https://spaceweatherarchive.com/2020/06/25/a-magnetic-anomaly-ripples-around-the-world/

Most of this summer and much of the last several summers on my walks or sitting on the back porch, I would literally feel the quiet. It wasn’t silence, but quiet. I still heard birds, cars, dogs barking, the wind, etc. My husband remarked the other day at the end of our walk about the quiet he experienced on the walk. We have been in solar minimum for several years.

For me it is like a winter snow storm and there is a quiet stillness outside with the snow muffling sound. This is only a little like that. After reading the scientific reasons above, it made me wonder if our bodies can feel the lack of cosmic noise. Whether when we are bombarded by a solar maximum, with large geomagnetic storms, that are bodies pick up on all that vibration and this kind of silence is gone from our experience.

My husband and I were on a ten week camping trip in 2010. We had a marvelous time seeing the United States and Canada. We planned out the trip with reservations at the National Parks, and after we came back to Glacier National Park from Canada, we headed east for the first time. We went to Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota. There were several land formations in the park, that had a path into them with were walls straight up on all sides. For the first time in my life, I experienced quiet. It was noticeable. I have never forgotten it.

This quiet is not the absence of sounds, it is the heightening of awareness.

I feel our bodies can teach us much about life experience, in ways we’ve never thought of. Sensing cosmic noise? I never would have thought my body could attune to that. We shall see.

As we continue this year of revelation, I wonder what will happen next.