Could the Mayan doomsday prophets have been on to something after all?
After the eponymous film about the ancient Mesoamerican prediction that the world will end in 2012 scared the socks off movie-goers and had sceptics shake their heads in disbelief, leading scientists now say that something close to apocalyptic could indeed occur when the sun rises on December 21, 2012.
Eminent astronomer K. Sundara Raman may dismiss the prophecy as a myth, but he says extremely abnormal activity on the sun that day will result in massive solar storms. “The solar wind, powered by huge coronal mass ejections, will fry communication networks and power grids across the world,” he says.
Unless some action is taken to mitigate the effect of the solar flare, Prof. Raman adds, entire cities, markets and government systems could plunge into chaos of the kind the modern world has never witnessed.
“The solar wind is a stream of stream of charged particles that blow out of the corona of the sun at supersonic speeds to the outer reaches of the planetary orbits,” explains Prof. Raman, head of Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Kodaikanal. “During violent sun storms like the one expected in December 2012, the sun ejects a huge volume of electrified gas. It is capable of damaging power grids, communication services, satellites, spacecraft and aircraft.”
He points out that a similar phenomenon resulted in a total blackout of Quebec province in Canada for nine days in March 1989.
“That event witnessed the release of energy equivalent to a billion megatons of TNT,” he adds, warning that the coming solar blast could hit TV stations, mobile services, GPS-aided navigation systems and even the Internet.
Mausumi Dikpati of Nasa’s National Centre for Atmospheric Research confirms that a solar storm is coming and it is going to be massive — much bigger than any other in the recent past. “The last time the solar storm affected Canada and not the rest of the world because of that country’s northerly latitude,” Prof. Raman noted. “But the storm that is coming will hit the entire planet.”