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According to a new newspaper, dozens – and according to one account up to four thousand – US mines exploded during the Vietnam War due to a historic solar storm, reports Atlas Obscura. Published in Space Weather, the paper investigates the causes of the 1972 mine blast off the coast of North Vietnam near the port of Hai Phong. "I am completely taken aback" by the power of the solar event, says co-author Delores Knipp, a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Knipp and his team found declassified US Navy documents that attributed mysterious detonations to powerful solar activity. Popular mechanics. They also discovered little-known scientific reports around the world that power grids had been affected, satellites damaged and air force sensors prompted to light up as if a nuclear bomb had exploded. American scientist.
In early August 1972, four solar flares erupted, the third being a coronal mass ejection – a huge emission of radiation particles and a high-energy plasma projecting electromagnetic pulses into space. "It was at that point that we knew that something nasty was happening that way," Knipp said in a press release. Normally taking days to reach Earth, the impulses arrived in an incredible 15 hours and destroyed the magnetosphere of the planet, a cover that protects against radiation. On the positive side, this has prompted the navy to make the mines more resistant to solar flares. Today, it reminds us to protect the Earth's infrastructure against solar storms, which, according to Knipp, occur every 70 years or so. The worst event of all time was the Carrington Event of 1859: "It's our flagship storm poster," says Knipp. "If such a bad storm were to reappear, we would have a lot of problems." (Read about a Martian storm worse than this decade.)
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