The strongest solar flare in recorded history burst into Earth’s atmosphere in 1859, bathing both hemispheres in brilliantly colorful aurorae as it wreaked worldwide havoc on telegraph systems. The celestial chaos was broadly witnessed, but lingering physical evidence of that storm, dubbed the Carrington event, has proven stubbornly elusive — until now, researchers report in the March 16 Geophysical Research Letters.
Ecologist Joonas Uusitalo of the University of Helsinki and his colleagues have identified the first known traces of the Carrington event: atoms of carbon-14 preserved in tree rings in Finland’s far north. Scientists previously hadn’t detected tree ring evidence of this event, although other trees have recorded more
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