Solar minimum #24

Fun fact: a similar dearth of sunspots was documented during the 1645-1715 period referred to as the Maunder Minimum. During this time, crops failed and the Thames River in London froze, making “frost fairs” along its frozen shores possible. Ironically, the Maunder Minimum also began just a few decades after the dawn of the age of telescopic astronomy. During this time, the idea of “spots on the Sun” was regulated to a controversial, and almost mythical status in mainstream astronomy.

~ Fraser Cain from, https://www.universetoday.com/139189/are-we-headed-towards-another-deep-solar-minimum/

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Does anyone else know the meme of the sound of a needle being pulled off of a record? …that “low screeching tearing rrrr r r r r rRRRRR RRRRRRRRRRRRRIP sound”?

Yeah, that’s what my brain did when I realized there was a modern era Dr Who episode about them investigating a mystery during a frost fair ON the frozen Thames.

Wait, that was actually a thing…

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Trapped atmospheric waves

Weather extremes in the summer—such as the record heat wave in the United States that hit corn farmers and worsened wildfires in 2012—have reached an exceptional number in the last ten years. Man-made global warming can explain a gradual increase in periods of severe heat, but the observed change in the magnitude and duration of some events is not so easily explained.

~ Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research from, http://phys.org/news/2014-08-atmospheric-triggered-weather-extremes.html

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