Nature's Archive Podcast

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[00:00:00] Michael Hawk: Nature is a very broad term, and as we discuss on this show, everything is connected. Geology impacts soil, and that dictates which plants can grow. But if we pull back even further, the ultimate engine driving our planet’s system is the sun. So when I think of nature’s archive and that big concept of nature, I love bringing these grand foundational subjects into our scope.

[00:00:23] Today is one such instance. Our guest is Dr. Ryan French, a solar astrophysicist and author who specializes in studying solar flares. Solar activity affects life on Earth in surprising ways, from creating spectacular auroras, the northern and southern lights, to disrupting GPS systems and power grids. And most fascinating for naturalists, these solar storms can even disrupt bird navigation and alter the foraging habits of bees.

[00:00:51] While we didn’t get into those aspects in this discussion, we talked about many other aspects of how the sun affects the Earth. Dr. French walks us through why solar flares occur and the even more impactful phenomenon called a coronal mass ejection, why these events follow an 11-year cycle, the current state of space weather forecasting, and how you can see and photograph beautiful auroral displays yourself.

[00:01:15] Dr. French has an extremely fun and informative social media presence, so be sure to check out ryanjfrench.com for resources and links.

[00:01:24] This was a super fun discussion, one I’ve wanted to have pretty much since I started Nature’s Archive. So without further delay, here is Dr. Ryan French

[00:01:33] All right, Ryan, thank you so much for joining me today

[00:01:36] Ryan French: Hi, Michael. Good to be here

[00:01:38] Michael Hawk: , I think longtime listeners know that I have, like, tons of kind of science-y, nerdy hobbies, and our topic today fits right in with one of those. So I’m super excited to have this conversation. It’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a very long time. So I can’t thank you enough for being here and spending the time with us.

[00:01:57] Ryan French: Oh, no, of course. Yeah happy to talk about this stuff all day long

[00:02:00] Michael Hawk: I’ll just say what that is real quick, and then we can get into the meat of the conversation. , I’ve long been very interested in radio wave propagation. When I was a young kid, I had this little AM/FM radio, and I was tuning around at night one time, and I picked up a radio station from halfway across the country.

[00:02:19] And I was like, “How is this happening?” And that led me on this path of researching the ionosphere, and then that led me to understand, like, how the sun charges the ionosphere. And then that led me to understand that sometimes other more interesting things happen caused by solar flares and even the aurora can affect radio wave propagation.

[00:02:41] So that sent me off on this path of, like, fascination that’s kind of, expressing itself today

[00:02:47] Ryan French: Wow. It sounds like you were a very industrial kid. I think I did not discover this stuff until much later in, in my life. So yeah, good for you. That’s awesome.

[00:02:57] Michael Hawk: So why don’t we talk about that? How did you discover it? What was your hook to get into astrophysics?

[00:03:03] Ryan French: Yeah, I feel like as a child, I was always sort of into space. I feel like this is pretty common among children, right? Like, you kind of pick, I don’t know. Do you like animals? Do you like space? Do you like dinosaurs? Do you like trucks? Do you like trains? So, every child sort of picks one of these things, and for me, it was space.

[00:03:20] I spent a few years, , as a kid with, stars on my ceiling and pictures on my wall, but I never really seriously considered it as a career option. I did for my undergraduate degree. I went and sort of studied astrophysics stuff for an undergraduate in London, but even then, I didn’t really think it was gonna be something that I did after.

[00:03:40] For me, space and the stars, I always found it really super interesting, but it always seemed a bit too sort of far removed from society, if that makes sense. Like, I wanted a job where I could do something where I felt like had sort of direct impact and relevance to everyday life, which most of astrophysics does not.

[00:03:58] But way back now in 2017, I did a summer internship. This internship was at the United Kingdom Met Office. It’s like their weather forecasting office, and the internship was not to understand regular Earth weather. It was to understand something called space weather, which essentially is the impact that the sun has on our sort of near Earth environment and our technology.

[00:04:19] And I spent one summer doing that, and everything sort of just clicked and fell into place in my brain. Like, to research the sun, this is astrophysics. I’m learning about a star, understanding how, things in the universe works, but it sort of had direct relevance to Earth and life on Earth. You mentioned radio propagation, how the sun can impact that.

[00:04:38] We can talk about that later. There are other things as well the sun can do to affect us, and just in my brain, sort of everything sort of perfectly marinated and clicked. So I was always sort of into it, but it wasn’t until I was , 19, 20 years old that it became a real life option for me.

[00:04:52] Michael Hawk: w- You mentioned when we were chatting at the front end that your title would be like a, a solar physicist. So that’s a specialty, I guess, within the realm of astrophysics. Are there subspecialties within that?

[00:05:04] Do you have a subspecialty?

[00:05:06] Ryan French: These sort of titles, if you ask one person to the next, it might give you slightly different answers. But to me, the sort of the, the broader field of astrophysics, and then within that you have these sort of more tighter fields. So, a solar physicist is somebody who researches the sun.

[00:05:21] There’s a heliophysicist some people might call themselves, and that more specifically is researching what happens sort of between the sun and the Earth. But if we’re sort of diving deeper into solar physics, where I am, my specialty is solar flares. So I don’t… There’s no catchy name for that, right? But I guess I’m a solar flare scientist, if you wanted to put a, an even tighter label on it

[00:05:42] Michael Hawk: Yeah, if this were Ologies, we would come up with a name to fit that,

[00:05:46] Ryan French: A solar flareologist

[00:05:48] Michael Hawk: there you go. So yeah, solar flares are super fascinating, and I think we’re gonna probably spend a good chunk of this discussion on that.

[00:05:55] So I found the right person, obviously. Why don’t we like to set a little bit of a baseline as to what we’re dealing with here. I think, one of the most common myths that exists out there about the sun is that it’s like a ball of fire. , It’s on fire, but that’s not the case.

[00:06:12] So can you tell me just a little bit about how the sun functions?

[00:06:16] Ryan French: That is true. There’s, there are many misconceptions about the sun, and you nailed the most common one on the head, that the sun is made of fire. If we just think about it for a moment, right, that breaks down almost immediately. Anyone who has been camping and made a campfire knows that fire requires oxygen, and there’s no oxygen in space.

[00:06:34] There’s no atmosphere of oxygen surrounding the sun. The sun is powered by something very specific happening inside the sun. This is a process called nuclear fusion. So here on Earth, we have fusion reactors.

[00:06:49] Fusion generators power some of our power grid. This works, via a process called nuclear fission, which essentially is the decaying of these very heavy elements, sort of. If you imagine a periodic table from your classroom, if you look at the very bottom of that table, you have very heavy elements.

[00:07:05] These break down, they release energy. What’s happening on the sun is the opposite, sort of the most basic process in the universe. What we have is the sun is 80% made up of a gas called hydrogen. We have hydrogen here on Earth. And this hydrogen gas is sort of compressed under enormous pressures from the sun.

[00:07:24] The sun weighs a lot, right? It’s a star. So these hydrogen atoms are sort of pushed together under this pressure, and as that happens, eventually, as you sort of press them hard enough, these two hydrogen atoms sort of collide and form a single helium atom. So you’ve turned hydrogen into helium, and this process releases a lot of energy, and this energy essentially pushes out from the inside of the star and sort of resists that sort of gravitational, sort of collapse that this, this star is trying t- to do.

[00:07:55] So all a star is, all the sun is, in essence, is just a balance of forces, where gravity is trying to compress it to a really small shape, and nuclear fusion is providing this outwards force to resist that collapse. So when we see the star, it is not fire. It’s not actively burning, but it is a very hot ball of gas or plasma, to be more specific, and this is powered by this nuclear fusion process.

[00:08:21] Michael Hawk: It’s a fascinating thing. Probably a whole podcast could be done on the processes going on there. These hydrogen atoms that are, getting smashed together, is this happening on the surface or in the core? And maybe you can tell me a little bit about the structure of the sun.

[00:08:37] Ryan French: Yeah, so all of this nuclear fusion is happening in the very core of the sun. If you do slice it in half from the middle to about sort of one-fifth of the way to the surface, this is the core. This is where all that energy release is happening. But in my opinion, all the interesting stuff does not happen in the middle of the sun.

[00:08:54] It actually happens on the outside of the sun. So the surface of the sun, the layer that we see with our eyes, you should never look at the sun directly, of course, but, the sunlight that reaches the ground here comes from the sun surface, which we call the photosphere.

[00:09:09] Now, the photosphere, we see some interesting things on the photosphere. We see these black spots called sunspots that I know we’re gonna talk about a little bit more. And above this photosphere, we have an atmosphere of the sun. So the sun does have an atmosphere. We don’t typically see it with our eyes.

[00:09:25] It’s called the corona. This comes from sort of the Spanish word for crown, and the only time we actually get to see this with our eyes is during a total solar eclipse.

[00:09:34] And during a total eclipse, When the moon fully blocks the sun, you can actually see the atmosphere of the sun. You can see this corona. And up here on the sun surface, the photosphere, the corona, far away from the nuclear fusion that’s happening inside the core, everything that happens up here, all the interesting things, is dominated not by nuclear forces, but by essentially just magnetic fields, electromagnetism.

[00:09:59] So the same force that sticks a magnet to your fridge is essentially determining everything that happens on the surface and atmosphere of the sun

[00:10:07] Michael Hawk: So is that driven by, like on Earth, we obviously we have a North Pole, a South Pole, there’s a magnetic field around Earth. Is there a similar sort of thing happening , on the Sun?

[00:10:17] Ryan French: Yes, something similar but way more complex. So I mentioned that the sun has these sort of dark patches on them called sunspots. These sunspots, as we’ve known pretty much for about 100 years now, each sunspot is basically a giant magnet nestled into the atmosphere of the sun. So because we have this sort of giant magnet sitting there, it basically repels the surface material away from this region.

[00:10:44] And so your plasma that is sitting there basically becomes sort of isolated. It’s not sort of touching anything else because everything outside is being repelled. It becomes a lot colder, and that’s why they appear dark, these sort of dark sunspot features. Now, because every one of these sunspots is basically a giant magnet, it’s not as simple as there being a north pole and a south pole.

[00:11:06] You basically have this underlying north and south pole, but then all across the surface, you have these mini north poles, south poles everywhere, and these all sort of twist and tangle together to make quite a complicated sort of web of magnetic fields way more complex than what we have here on Earth.

[00:11:21] Michael Hawk: Maybe this gets too deep, but I’d like to try to ask anyway. So I’m thinking about like, okay, we have all these things happening on the sun, like all, all this crazy fusion and there’s I- I’m assuming a lot of ionization happening, so you have charged particles.

[00:11:33] Is that what leads to the magnetism? Or is there like another force that’s really driving the magnetism, coalescing into a sunspot?

[00:11:41] Ryan French: So our understanding is at the moment that these magnetic fields are being produced sort of midway deep through the sun. So the sun is rotating, right? Rotates relatively quickly relative to the Earth’s rotation. Takes about 24 days for the equator of the sun to rotate, but when you consider how big the sun is, the actual speed of that is a lot quicker than Earth’s rotation.

[00:12:05] But although the equator of the sun takes about 24 days to rotate, the poles of the sun rotate much slower, maybe every sort of 35 days. And these flows are sort of happening quite deep inside the sun, and you mentioned before sort of ionization, charged particles. We basically have, because of this rotation, charged particles are whizzing around inside of the sun, and if you have sort of charged things moving, that will generate a magnetic field.

[00:12:33] And because we have this, what we call differential rotation, the equator rotates quicker than at the poles, things do get twisted, tangled, and it’s where these sort of twisted, tangled regions emerge at the surface of the sun, that’s where we get those sunspot regions.

[00:12:49] Michael Hawk: Gotcha. So maybe this is a good lead-in then talking about sunspots. Like I suspect a lot of the listeners have heard the term at least. And I understand that sunspots, at least the frequency and size and quantities of them follow a approximately 11-year cycle. So can you tell me what’s going on with that?

[00:13:11] Ryan French: So we do have what we call a solar cycle on the sun that lasts about 11 years. At the bottom of this cycle which we reached back in 2019, 2020, the sun does nothing of interest . There are no sunspots, so because there are no sunspots, we don’t get any of the other things that we will talk about today.

[00:13:28] We don’t get solar flares, coronal mass ejections. We don’t get sort of strong northern lights here on Earth. But over the course of this cycle, that solar minimum, sort of five and a half years later, half of that 11, we reach solar maximum, which actually happened towards the end of 2024, and at this point, there can be hundreds of sunspots every year.

[00:13:49] A bunch of these events, we’ll talk about some recent sightings the last few years that we’ve had of, like, the northern lights across North America and across the world, and this all happens because the sun has been very active the last few years. And the reason we have this solar cycle to begin with is because of this thing that I mentioned before, this differential rotation, as it’s called, where the equator rotates much faster than the poles.

[00:14:12] Basically, if you imagine a very sort of basic global magnetic field like the Earth’s, you’ve got a north pole, you’ve got a south pole. At solar minimum, when the sun isn’t doing anything, its magnetic field kind of looks like that. But because the equator is rotating faster, it kind of acts to sort of wind up and coil up this magnetic field, and that’s when you get this twisting and this tangling and all these sunspots form.

[00:14:36] So this 11-year cycle is caused by that different rotation rates

[00:14:39] Michael Hawk: Yeah, and I just– Your hand motions there in describing, I know the, the listeners can’t see that, but it made me realize something. I recall that there’s also a pattern as to sort of the latitude at which sunspots occur throughout the cycle, and it sounds sort of like what you’re describing as it coils up tighter and tighter, these twists and yeah, all of these sort of migrate across the, different latitudes of the sun.

[00:15:04] Ryan French: Yep, absolutely. A, a good analogy would be if you take a sort of rubber band and you hold it at both ends, so you’ve gotta sort of got that loop, and you start twisting with your fingers, like the middle, the kinks start on the outside and go to the middle, and it’s where these kinks form that you can imagine that’s where your sunspots are forming

[00:15:19] Michael Hawk: So we’ve talked a little bit about how sunspots form how do they disappear? Like, they sort of dramatically collapse. What happens in that process?

[00:15:28] Ryan French: Yeah, so these sunspots you can think of as just being these reservoirs containing loads and loads of energy. Now, specifically, they are containing magnetic energy, so energy stored in these magnetic fields. And these magnetic fields, they can’t just stay there, or rather, the magnetic energy cannot stay there forever.

[00:15:49] That would become unstable. So what actually happens is if you have these magnetic fields, let’s go back to that rubber band analogy again. If you keep twisting and sort of tangling these rubber bands above your active region, eventually, if you pull and twist the, the bands are gonna break, right?

[00:16:04] These rubber bands are gonna snap. And as that happens, you’ll hear a little ping, a little sort of snapping sound, right? Maybe it pings back and that the energy of that band will hurt your hand or whatever. The same thing happens in sunspots. These fields, they twist, they tangle, they break, they sort of snap, and this energy is converted from the magnetic fields, where it was before.

[00:16:23] It can’t vanish. It’s converted into a light, so across the full light spectrum. It heats up the plasma, it accelerates particles, and we see this process here from Earth as a solar flare. A solar flare is just the conversion of magnetic energy in the atmosphere of the sun into these different types of energy, and we sort of see that as a flash of light.

[00:16:46] And in about half of cases, but not every single time we have a solar flare, as these sort of rubber bands, going back to the ana- the analogy, as they sort of snap, in about half of those occasions, that rubber band will actually sort of fling out of your hand and across the room, and the same thing happens on the sun as well.

[00:17:03] When these magnetic fields break and you have that burst of energy, about half of the time, a bunch of plasma, a bunch of magnetic field actually fires away from the sun out into the solar system, and this essentially is an eruption from the sun. The name we call it, it’s called a coronal mass ejection.

[00:17:20] That sounds like a complicated word. It’s not really. Coronal mass ejection, it’s an ejection of mass from the corona, which if you recall is what we call the atmosphere of the sun

[00:17:29] Michael Hawk: In this process, you said about half the time there’s this correlation between CMEs and solar flares. So if there was a solar flare that occurred and there’s no CME what effect would we see here on Earth, whether it’s just through instrumentation or actually sensible effect?

[00:17:44] Ryan French: Yeah. So I mentioned before that these solar flares, the bulk of the energy that is released comes in the form of light. So mainly this happens in not the types of light that we see with our eyes, so not visible light, but we get it in sort of X-rays, ultraviolet, radio waves, microwaves, sort of across that full spectrum.

[00:18:04] Now, here on Earth, just to teleport from the sun to the Earth for a moment, the way that we use radio communication, you mentioned radio communication at the start. The way that this works is if you can’t see point B from point A, the way that you send a radio signal is it essentially bounces off the upper atmosphere of the Earth.

[00:18:23] But when we have a very large solar flare, and we have these X-rays and ultraviolet light hitting the Earth’s upper atmosphere, specifically sort of a region of our atmosphere called the ionosphere, where we have a bunch of these charged particles.

[00:18:38] As they hit this region, it sort of expands, it heats up, and radio waves will no longer bounce off the atmosphere. So what this means is that you can no longer, on Earth, send radio signals at a bunch of frequencies over the horizon, so it essentially becomes useless. So in the case of very large flares, we lose radio communication with flights, with ships GPS will stop working all of these fun things just because of a burst of energy 93 million miles away on the sun

[00:19:06] Michael Hawk: I’m gonna get kind of esoteric for a second. When I was learning about all this when I was a kid, so, a lot has changed, and I’m sure I misunderstood a good portion of it. The way I understood it was that when these events occurred, that there was a lower region of the ionosphere that would kind of get charged and the absorption would happen there.

[00:19:22] I think it was the D region, is what they called it. Is that roughly accurate?

[00:19:26] Ryan French: Yes, that’s absolutely it. Yep

[00:19:28] Michael Hawk: so then that’s sort of a, a normal solar flare. How long does it take for that effect to reach the Earth?

[00:19:34] Ryan French: Yeah. So basically as soon as we see the solar flare, those effects are here. So the sun is 93 million miles away. It takes light a finite time to travel that distance. Light travels at 300,000 kilometers per second, so it takes eight and a bit minutes for light to travel from the sun to the Earth. So there’s a solar flare on the sun.

[00:19:56] By the time our detectors register that eight minutes later, the effects have already

[00:20:01] started. Yeah. it’s, it’s, it’s already started. Yeah. it’s, it’s, it’s already

[00:20:04] Michael Hawk: Yeah, gotcha. So this is all in the in the same spectrum traveling at the speed of light. So that may serve as a good contrast for CMEs. So now tell me what happens with a CME and how it differs from, say, this sort of generic solar flare?

[00:20:17] Ryan French: Certainly. I think it’s a common misconception for the s- even people who sort of know these words. A lot of people mix up solar flares and CMEs, or coronal mass ejections, thinking they’re the same thing. They aren- they’re very different. As we said before, solar flares are this burst of light, of energy, that can reach us near instantly.

[00:20:35] Coronal mass ejections, they, these are physical eruptions of stuff from the sun. So it’s not light, does not travel at light speed. Travels at, I was gonna say slow speed. It’s really not slow. These things can travel about 1,000 miles per second. So 1,000, 2,000 miles per second, these things really whizzing.

[00:20:56] And these are essentially these structures of plasma, of particles. They carry with them their own sort of magnetic field that they’ve, have sort of dragged away from the sun. And if you’re going sort of 1,000 or 2,000 miles per second, 93 million miles, these things can take under one day for the very quickest events, but typically three to four days to travel from the sun to the Earth.

[00:21:19] So we do have a lot more sort of warning that these things are coming our way.

[00:21:23] Michael Hawk: When these events happen, does the directionality come into play? So like, I’m just thinking the sun is three-dimensional and it has surface pointing in every direction. If it’s visible from Earth, does it affect Earth? Or are there situations where it doesn’t really affect us, it just passes off in some other direction?

[00:21:43] Ryan French: The answer is solar flares are all directions. So if you can see the solar flare, right, if it… As long as it’s not on the backside of the sun, if you can see it on the edge of the sun, sort of the middle of the sun, if you can see it, that light has reached you, so you feel those effects.

[00:22:00] The coronal mass ejection is way more directional. So again, because this is a physical thing that you’re throwing out there into space from the sun, it matters where on the sun this is happening. So imagine if you’re looking straight at the sun from your perspective, it could sort of go left of the sun, up, down, right of the sun, and it’s only if it’s coming near the middle of the sun, coming straight towards you, that is when it’s gonna arrive at Earth

[00:22:24] Michael Hawk: Yeah. Okay. I have to put a pin in a bunch of different side questions here that I hinted we were gonna discuss. But what this reminded me of, I will definitely link in the show notes to some videos of solar flares because we’re talking about y- you can see those, and I know that there are some telescopes that have recorded nice time-lapse, you know sequences of a solar flare, which are just fascinating to see.

[00:22:48] So on that thread, can you see a CME, or is it largely invisible? Maybe there are certain detectors that can see it. I don’t know.

[00:22:57] Ryan French: So actually on, on my personal YouTube channel, I have compilations that are sort of many minutes long of sort of the best curated flares and CMEs that we’ve had in the last few years, so I’m happy to send that to

[00:23:07] Michael Hawk: I will link to those for sure.

[00:23:08] Ryan French: Yeah. And the answer again comes down to specifically where you’re looking and what wavelengths of light you can see in.

[00:23:16] So if you are just using the human eye, like you and I, if you are looking through sort of a, a white light solar telescope, so a telescope that you can safely look at the sun through, you wouldn’t really see any of these things. You wouldn’t see the solar flare. The sun is just way too bright, outshines that light.

[00:23:33] But if you look at certain wavelengths, so if you look in X-rays or ultraviolet light, the solar flare lights up like a Christmas tree. It outshines the sun by thousands millions of times. There is a very special type of telescope. They are quite expensive, unfortunately. It’s called a hydrogen alpha telescope, and if you have a hydrogen alpha telescope, this shows you light from a very specific wavelength that is emitted by s- sort of hydrogen plasma, not on the sun’s surface, but a little higher in the sun.

[00:24:02] And with hydrogen alpha telescopes, you can actually see both solar flares and, if you’re very lucky, coronal mass ejections. So they are visible at these wavelengths. But most of our telescopes that observe these things are not observing in the spectrum of the human eye.

[00:24:17] So we can use, as I mentioned, X-rays, ultraviolet telescopes sort of telescopes that block out the light from the middle of the sun so you get a, a view of the fainter corona of the sun, and this is where we often see these coronal mass ejections traveling.

[00:24:31] But I will say the caveat is with the coronal mass ejection, you can see it erupt, so you see it happen, and then you have nothing for, like, two, three days until it arrives at Earth or near Earth, where we have satellites that can begin to then pick up sort of that change in plasma as it sort of flows past these sensors

[00:24:50] Michael Hawk: I don’t know that we finished the question that I had before of comparing the CME to a solar flare and its effect on Earth. So you said that you have all of this mass that’s been ejected and there’s a magnetic field associated with that. Does that magnetic field stay intact?

[00:25:05] But what’s the effect now of these magnetic fields and associated particles when they hit the Earth?

[00:25:13] Ryan French: And the effect of these coronal mass ejections are more noteworthy than the solar flare stuff that we mentioned. So if you picture the Earth, for example, we talked about before how the Earth has its own magnetic field, which sort of acts as a, a protective bubble or force field around our planet.

[00:25:30] Without this, these things would destroy us. Thankfully, we have this shield. Planets like Mars used to have a magnetic field. They lost the magnetic field, and then without their shield, they lost their atmosphere in a few million years, and now Mars is barren, right? But we are protected.

[00:25:45] But this eruption from the sun, this CME, it has its own magnetic field, and this magnetic field from the CME collides with the magnetic field of the Earth. Now, what happens next depends somewhat on how these things are sort of pointing, right? The Earth has a north pole pointing up, if you have this CME is traveling, and it sort of has an orientation where the magnetic north is pointing up, you might remember back from school, when you play around with magnets, if you have a north and a north, they sort of repel one another, right?

[00:26:16] So in this case, the CME will flow right past Earth, like sort of, water around a rock and nothing will happen. But if you have the opposite situation, where the CME is traveling from the sun and your magnetic field is not pointing straight north, again, if you have a north and a south with your little magnets and you’re playing with at school, they’re gonna attract, right?

[00:26:36] And that’s basically what happens. These magnetic fields, they will merge, they will interact, and what happens is this causes the entire protective shield of the Earth, causes it to sort of wobble. Sort of wobbles backwards and forth, layers are stripped off around it, and this is called a geomagnetic storm.

[00:26:53] . And there are a couple of key effects of that the first of which is a fun effect, right? As this happens, high-energy particles from this sort of eruption from the sun, they’re able to travel through our magnetic field. They flow down these sort of imaginary lines, and they collide with the air above us.

[00:27:11] And when this happens, as you have these sort of particles impacting the, the oxygen above our heads, it causes it to glow, and it is that glowing that we see as the northern lights or the southern lights or, the, the aurora, more, more colloquially,

[00:27:23] but there is a unpretty side of this as well. So as all these magnetic fields are wobbling and bouncing backwards and forwards, something very strange can happen to our technology So there is something, it’s gonna sound fairly boring, something in physics that we call Faraday’s law. Okay, sound, sounds boring.

[00:27:44] It kind of is, but it’s important. Faraday’s law sort of says that if you have a magnetic field and you change this magnetic field over something conductive like a, a wire, for example, if you change that field, you will create an electric flow through that wire. This is the principle of wireless charging if you have sort of a wireless watch charger or a wireless phone or even the, the Maglev chargers for MacBooks, this uses that same principle.

[00:28:11] You change the magnetic field, you create electricity. So when we have these geomagnetic storms, suddenly you have electricity being created all across the world in conductive things. So your railway networks, your power lines, your telephone cables, your internet cables suddenly have electricity flowing through them that is being created by the Earth’s magnetic field and this can cause some potential hazardous sort of damages in some cases to our technological infrastructure

[00:28:41] Michael Hawk: I recall a, a situation back I think it was 1989, where Quebec lost part of their power grid. So I have two questions for that. one is that a scenario such as you’re describing? And I hear this concern about power grids a lot, arising and I believe there’s a correlation with the size or the length because, , more electricity can accumulate over that kind of space.

[00:29:08] Is that accurate? Can you tell me a little bit more about those scenarios?

[00:29:13] Ryan French: Yeah, that’s accurate. And this 1989 scenario you’re talking about is exactly bang, bang on what I’m talking about. There was a large, I think it was a hydroelectric plant in Quebec. We had this geomagnetic storm, a very large one, much larger than anything we’ve sort of had in recent decades.

[00:29:27] And what can happen, as I mentioned, you have this electricity is created in these power grids. And you might say, “What’s the problem? Surely power grids are meant to have electricity in them.” The answer is yes, of course, but there’s a, a limit, right, to how much power these lines and these transformers can deal with.

[00:29:44] So if you’re artificially creating more electricity in these power lines, you can overload transformers, you can break certain components of the grid, sort of fires can break out, right? So absolutely. And as you alluded to, there are many factors that determine this. Part of it is how far you are transporting your electricity from sort of point A to point B.

[00:30:07] The longer that distance, then that is also going to relate to, how much power can be built up. There are other factors as well. Latitude is a slight factor. The capacity of your system, right? If you have a newer, fresher system, it’s gonna be far less vulnerable than the sort of older systems where technology has improved a lot since then.

[00:30:24] And another big one for this 1989 event is actually your surface geology, so the ground beneath your feet, right? If it is something that’s sort of iron rich, then you sort of can assist that power grid in building up this, this excess electricity that eventually will break it down. There have been a couple other examples as well.

[00:30:44] 2003, there was a large sort of event, and this caused power outages in both Sweden and South Africa as well

[00:30:53] Michael Hawk: I wonder if that is the event where I saw the aurora for the first time. It– I, I wanna say it was like in October of 2003.

[00:31:01] Ryan French: it was right around Halloween, so that was the very same event.

[00:31:04] Michael Hawk: And I do actually have some photos of that. They aren’t stellar by any stretch because I think I, I was a little too far south to see the best of it, but perhaps the same event.

[00:31:12] Ryan French: Yeah, this 2003 event is the largest in a very long time. So we’ve had some quite large events recently. So May sort of 11, 12th, 2024 was a very large event, I mentioned that this is called a geomagnetic storm.

[00:31:27] We measure these on a scale of one to five. So this May 2024 event we had was a level five event, but not as large as this 2003 event, which was the previous level five event. And since then we’ve had sort of a few level four events, which are still sort of sizable. Some of these make the news, and you see the aurora sort of all across North America and around the world as well.

[00:31:49] But still, nothing has matched this 2003 event for several decades.

[00:31:53] Michael Hawk: Why don’t we talk about those measurements a little bit more? Because I I understand that there’s actually a scale for solar flares anyway that goes like from A to X. Tell me about that. How is that measured and sort of what’s the difference between these different levels?

[00:32:08] Ryan French: So there are sort of three main types of space weather, and each of these have their own scale. So there’s the geomagnetic storm index, which goes from a, a G1 to a G5. There is something we’ve not really talked about today yet, but there’s sort of a, a solar particle index that goes from S1 to S5.

[00:32:25] And then to answer your question, there’s a solar flare one, which goes from an R1 to R5, R standing for sort of radio blackout, which is what happens when we have these large solar flares. We talked about these radio waves don’t really work, and that R1 to R5 correlates to these levels of solar flares on the sun.

[00:32:43] So we have flares on the sun. These are categorized as being A, B, C, M, and X. Don’t ask me, don’t ask me why. Don’t ask me. The A to C makes sense. But you can sort of think of this M-class flare being sort of a, a moderate solar flare. At the moment, we have sort of a few of these every week.

[00:33:03] . They can cause slight outages in radio co-communications, but nothing sort of extreme. But the very largest flares are sort of X-class solar flares. These are the ones that cause these, these larger scale radio blackouts, and these scales basically just correspond directly to the amount of X-rays being produced from the sun.

[00:33:24] That’s how we define these levels.

[00:33:26] Michael Hawk: Gotcha. So at this point, we’re in cycle 25, correct?

[00:33:32] Ryan French: Correct. We are in the 11-year solar cycle we talked about. We’re in the 25th solar cycle sort of since measurements began

[00:33:38] Michael Hawk: And we’re near the peak. The, the peak has not been declared yet if I understand. Oh, it has.

[00:33:43] Ryan French: the peak was actually, well, we didn’t… You don’t know you’re in the peak when you’re in the peak. It’s I don’t know, if you invested the stock market or something, right? You don’t know when the peak’s gonna be while you’re in it. But upon reflection, you can sort of say when it was, and we sort of are pretty confident now that the peak was in October 2024.

[00:33:58] Michael Hawk: right, so we’re getting a couple years past

[00:34:02] Ryan French: we’re a couple years past, yeah, but we’re still quite high in terms of solar activity. There is an interesting distinction, actually. You mentioned before how you noticed when we have this 11-year solar cycle, sunspots sort of move from being sort of at higher latitudes down to sort of the equator.

[00:34:18] So this is sort of where we are. Because we’re late in the solar cycle, there are actually fewer sunspots and fewer solar flares than there were at the peak. But because everything is sort of being compressed together on the sun, so towards the equator, the solar flares that we do have, although fewer of them, the biggest solar flares on record all happen during this later phase of the cycle.

[00:34:41] So we do still expect this year, 2026, 2027, we still do expect some further significant solar activity that could cause more strong examples of the aurora

[00:34:52] Michael Hawk: You read my mind. I was gonna ask about that because I had this inkling that the downside of the cycle was still a very active period. So, before I forget I know there are a number of different, I think they’re primarily through NOAA and related agencies, but there are a number of websites I’ve stumbled upon that kind of give you status of the geomagnetic field and these different geomagnetic storm ratings and that sort of thing.

[00:35:21] Are there any resources that you think are good for, say, amateur folks that are just interested in, they see the headline, X-class flare. If they wanna monitor and get a sense of, is there going to be an aurora? Is there a place that people can go and get that, at least get an idea of the chance?

[00:35:41] Ryan French: Certainly, yeah. So NOAA is a good one. They run the Space Weather Prediction Center, and they are sort of the official sort of government agency voice of what to expect, when to expect it. There are a lot of sort of third-party apps that use NOAA data and sort of put it into sort of quite nice, organized predictions for you, but these are still stemming originally from NOAA.

[00:36:07] So a good app that I like to use, it’s called Space Weather Live. You can set up notifications on your phone if you wanna know when there’s been a big flare, or if you want to know when the aurora is likely. But the problem is, all of these metrics, right, this, this G4, G3, G5, this X class, there are still a lot of factors in there that these parameters don’t quite capture.

[00:36:28] So the best thing, honestly, is I think, go on social media and follow scientists who are experts in these things. I’ll name drop myself, but there are, doz- dozens of people, and there will be posts sort of interpreting this data for you. So you don’t have to look at this data and say, “Okay, what does this mean?”

[00:36:46] You can go and, refresh Twitter or Instagram, whatever, and get a sort of a better prediction of what’s happening. Because as, as, as we talked about before, these eruptions that travel from the sun, they are directional. So you can see a solar flare. We say, “Okay, solar flare’s just happened.

[00:37:01] It did produce a strong eruption, a CME, that’s heading towards us. Let’s try and predict how long that’s gonna take to get here.” However, that is very challenging. If you are looking at something head-on and something’s coming towards you, it can be very difficult to sort of say exactly how fast that thing is moving.

[00:37:19] So there’s some uncertainty into how long that thing can take to arrive. Is it gonna take two days to get here? Is it gonna take four days to get here? And so that’s sort of the main source of uncertainty of these predictions is in part this timing. But also, I mentioned how the, the orientation of this magnetic structure matters.

[00:37:35] That will determine whether it’s gonna flow right past Earth or cause a, a major event. And again, we don’t know what that’s gonna be basically until it arrives here

[00:37:45] Michael Hawk: So speaking of auroras, so for those that are hoping still to see an aurora through this cycle and not have to wait, another, well, at this point, I guess nine years for the upswing of, or eight year, however long it would be before the, the next cycle begins to increase. Something that comes up quite a bit is you see different colors in the aurora, and does that correlate with types of particles or altitude or, the layer of the atmosphere that’s being charged?

[00:38:12] Ryan French: Yeah, so the different colors we see in the aurora this is an effect of our own atmosphere primarily. So in our atmosphere, we have oxygen, we have nitrogen. If you keep going higher up into our atmosphere, you have more oxygen and nitrogen, but a sort of slightly different species of oxygen, not the same sort of oxygen that we breathe here on the ground. And there’s an interesting sort of fundamental principle in, in, in physics that different elements and sort of different versions of elements have these certain wavelengths of light, so certain colors essentially, that are almost like signatures and blueprints of them. So you might be familiar, sort of if you go outside in the city, maybe not nowadays with LED lights, but you used to have sodium streetlights that glowed bright orange.

[00:38:59] That’s because sodium gas, if you heat it up, it glows orange. Now, if you heat up oxygen, right, the type of oxygen that we breathe, if you slam particles into it from the sun, its sort of fundamental wavelength that it wants to emit at is green. So when you see green aurora, that is happening very low.

[00:39:16] That’s the type of oxygen that we breathe, and that is not too far above our heads. The red aurora is also from oxygen, but that different species of oxygen happening way, way higher in the atmosphere, and it is this type of oxygen, again, we don’t have down here on the ground, but it’s this that glows red.

[00:39:35] Nitrogen also sort of glows blue, sort of purply bluish. Sometimes you can see that, but the sort of green and red are the most common. And that’s why if you’re seeing the aurora from a lot further south, or you’re seeing the northern lights from further south and you sort of see the aurora on the horizon, you’re more likely to see the red simply because the red is much higher up, so you can see it from much further away.

[00:39:57] But if you travel to somewhere like Norway, Alaska, Greenland, and you see the aurora above you, you’re looking straight up, so you’re seeing that green emission just above your head.

[00:40:08] Michael Hawk: And that also got me thinking, like I, I’ve had many circumstances myself where I’ve been hopeful that I can go out and see the Aurora. I see people in my area with great photos, so I go out and I strike out. I don’t see them. And I know there’s a lot of reasons why that might be, but when we know there’s an event happening, if someone wants to see the Aurora, what are sort of the best practices for somebody to be able to actually experience that?

[00:40:33] Ryan French: So again, it depends where you are. If you’re on vacation somewhere very far north, you can get the aurora even when there’s no sort of strong geomagnetic storm happening. You get them all the time. But if you want to see sort of a, a rare geomagnetic storm event, you’ve seen on the news it’s gonna happen, and you want to know where to go, you want to go somewhere with a clear view north, so no sort of mountains or trees or buildings to your north.

[00:41:01] You want to go somewhere where it’s very dark. The aurora is faint, right? So if you have sort of even a little bit of light pollution, it can be very difficult to pick up those faint colors. So somewhere with a clear and dark view north, and you want to take a device that you can take a long exposure photo with.

[00:41:18] Now, this is much easier today, right? ‘Cause nowadays, every iPhone in everyone’s pocket can take long exposure photos. So even just with an iPhone, you can set sort of a 10-minute exposure, and you can sort of begin to pick out those, those colors

[00:41:30] Michael Hawk: 10 minutes even. I didn’t realize that long of an exposure. I was still sort of thinking 30

[00:41:36] Ryan French: Sorry, did I say 10 minutes? I

[00:41:37] Michael Hawk: okay.

[00:41:38] Ryan French: Sorry, that’s my mistake, yeah.

[00:41:39] Michael Hawk: All right. Well, good. So if you can find a spot where you can look north and there’s no city obstructing the view, you don’t have light pollution.

[00:41:46] Ryan French: Yeah

[00:41:47] Michael Hawk: So then in cases where you can actually see it with the naked eye, those are stronger events, or you happen to be further north

[00:41:54] Ryan French: Typically what might happen is with your eye, you might see structures of brighter light, but it might look white or gray to your eye. We talked about pillars or curtain structures that can wobble. If it’s bright enough that you can pick out colors, and if it’s really bright that you can definitely see the reds and the greens.

[00:42:13] But if you’re only seeing that white structure, your phone, again, 10 seconds, not 10 minutes, even 10 seconds, you’ll be able to see those colors that your eye cannot see

[00:42:24] Michael Hawk: I’m kind of thinking about a parallel, say, with with earthquakes. We have scales of earthquakes, it’s logarithmic there’s a huge range of sizes and intensities that can result. And it sounds like what you’re describing here, there’s a similar, if not greater range of events that happen from the sun, given how huge and powerful it is.

[00:42:46] So, what’s the worst that could happen here on Earth from a huge solar flare with a correspondingly large CME?

[00:42:57] Ryan French: It’s still sort of slightly up for debate in the scientific community just because we don’t have many data points for what these really large events look like. So we talked about how we have these scales sort of, G1 to G5, for example, and we’ve had some G5s in recent years, 2024, 2000, 2003, but we know that the events can get much, much larger than this.

[00:43:20] So the biggest event in human record was an event that dates back to September 1st, 1859, it is famously called the Carrington Event being named after a, a British astronomer called Richard Carrington, who saw this solar flare on the sun before the eruption then arrived at Earth.

[00:43:39] And in that scenario, the peak of technology at the time was telegraph machines, right? And these telegraph machines, they started sending and receiving sort of phantom messages. These random signals started coming through, letters, numbers, and when operators would switch the power off or try turn it on or try and fix it, these signals would keep coming.

[00:43:58] There would be sparks. They would get electric shocks. And this is because, as we discussed before, during these geomagnetic storms, these telegraph wires essentially are carrying an electric current that’s being produced by this magnetic field. And this event is the largest that we’ve had on record, so the largest sort of variation wobble in Earth’s magnetic field that we’ve seen. So we often use this event as an example worst case scenario, quote unquote, if that were to happen today Realistically, we say worst case scenario, we consider this to be like a once in 200 or once in 250-year event. So you know there are one in 1,000 year events, one in 10,000 years events, and we don’t really consider them when thinking about the worst case scenario ’cause those time frames are sort of, too long to think about.

[00:44:49] We don’t really know much about these events, but so for now, we’ll just call this once in 250 year flare a worst case scenario. Now, estimates do vary, but in general, if that were to happen today, the first thing I’ll say is absolutely will not be the end of the world. I come across people who think the, the

[00:45:09] a solar flare is gonna be doomsday apocalyptic. That is not the case. But it will be a larger scale natural disaster with economic impacts that do sort of mirror the other worst natural disasters that we experience, like earthquakes and tsunamis and things. And so some of these effects are as follows.

[00:45:27] We think that as many as one in five satellites could be permanently broken, either breaking up in orbit or burning up in our atmosphere, so we could lose 20% of our in-orbit infrastructure, which is significant. We think there will be regional power outages. This is not gonna be a global power outage, but regions that are more vulnerable for those reasons we discussed earlier could lose transformers, for example, and that could cause, power outages for a couple of weeks while you sort of repair those transformers.

[00:46:00] A few years ago, I can’t remember if it was ’21 or ’22, there was that big winter storm in Texas, and I think they lost sort of some, some large scale transformers and it was really cold and, people got sick and I think some people lost their lives due to this loss in power.

[00:46:13] And so it could be that sort of scale, sort of regional infrastructure you could lose from that for a

[00:46:19] Michael Hawk: And I could imagine, sorry to, to interject, but just thinking about these two things that you mentioned, losing power and losing satellites, which probably affects GPS, like there’s a major supply chain impact to that. So I could see there being shortages of lots of goods

[00:46:33] Ryan French: Certainly. Certainly, yeah. So, on, on the supply chain issue, right, we can lose radio communication for a couple of days, so that means grounded flights. Your flights are not gonna be able to take off if they’re… if you don’t have radio communication. Back in 2010, there was a famous volcanic eruption in Iceland and across Europe and the European Union.

[00:46:52] Flights were grounded for this whole period and that caused, again, chaos.

[00:46:55] Chaos. Similarly, you might have ships, navigation issues without radio communications.

[00:47:01] You mentioned the GPS. We would lose GPS again for a few days. This recent event in May 2024, it was announced that actually a loss in GPS over that weekend caused half a billion dollars of damage to the US agricultural sector. And this seems random. How can a solar flare cause disruption to, to farming, right?

[00:47:24] It’s because these big, huge automated farming machines are not driven by a person sat behind a wheel. They are all fully automated and use GPS, and this is right at the peak of sort of sowing season, I suppose. And none of the equipment was working for like two days, and that caused a lot of disruption.

[00:47:42] So, a very large event. None of the individual impacts are anything particularly new or unique, but you would have this coalescence again, p- power outages, flights being canceled and delays, loss of GPS. All of these sort of different things sort of merging together could cause, h- hundreds of billions of dollars worth of economic impacts.

[00:48:03] But crucially, no direct harm to human health. There is a caveat there. If you are high, at high altitudes on a plane near the poles, then there are increased radiation risks during these events. But airlines know this and they actually reroute planes even within sort of moderate sized solar flares.

[00:48:25] But if you are an astronaut above the atmosphere, or even worse, if you’re an astronaut outside our magnetic field going to the moon, for example, as an Artemis 2 or Artemis 4 astronaut rather then you would be biologically at risk to increased dos- doses of radiation, which could lead to increased risks of cancers and things like that.

[00:48:47] But unless you’re an astronaut, there’s no physical damage or risk to your body

[00:48:52] Michael Hawk: So like from a personal property standpoint, our phones, computers, cars, microwave ovens, those sorts of things are generally safe in this e- sort of event?

[00:49:01] Ryan French: Yeah, they’re safe. So we talked about before there’s a, a scale aspect to this. So you need to have a long conductive material for this electric field to sort of generate over, right? So, railway networks is another thing will not work ’cause that’s just a long conductive thing, right, that stretches hundreds of miles.

[00:49:19] But your individual devices are not gonna spark or blow up or conduct anything unusual. Your phone, you’ll notice you may lose, or you would lose in a very large event GPS signal. The frequencies that you use for regular phone calling actually probably would not be affected as much, but your sort of 5G and your GPS network would be impacted.

[00:49:39] Michael Hawk: Obviously there’s a lot of importance in being able to predict when these events are going to happen and you’ve already touched on a number of reasons why that’s difficult.

[00:49:50] So maybe you can give an overview of where we’re at with space weather forecasting.

[00:49:56] Ryan French: And then I’ll just pick up on that thing you said where, space weather forecasting is important, not just for this one in 200 year event, but you know, this one in every one year event, one in every five year event. If you do work in power industries or I talked about 2024, we lost GPS.

[00:50:12] If you work in these industries, you do care about these smaller events as well. Even if it doesn’t become public attention, there are people working behind the scenes who do care about this. At the moment, the state of space weather forecasting is we see a sunspot region on the sun. We can look at this sunspot, we can sort of assess its complexity, we say, so how likely it is to store and release energy.

[00:50:35] And from that, we can release a sort of probabilistic forecast of how likely big flares are. So sort of imagine, 5 out of 10 times we saw a flare this si– sorry, a sunspot this size, it produced a big flare. So we have a 50% chance of this doing something big. We’re not yet at the point of being able to watch a sunspot and say, “Okay, I can see that energy building.

[00:50:57] Tomorrow, 6:00 PM, there’s gonna be a flare.” We’re not there yet. So the flare happens. Maybe we expected, maybe we didn’t expect it, and then we can actually do some proper forecasting. We have data points. We see an eruption that may or may not leave the sun. If it does not leave the sun, cool.

[00:51:11] No worries. If it does leave the sun, that’s when the work begins, right? We basically analyze these images that we have of these sort of eruptions leaving the sun towards Earth, and what that looks like, if it’s heading straight towards Earth, you actually see a sort of a growing ring around the sun, so we call it a halo coronal mass ejection, that will tell you that this thing is heading straight towards you because, you see this ring around the sun And from that, we have to try and predict how fast it’s coming, how big it is, and how powerful it’s gonna hit Earth.

[00:51:43] Now, the biggest problem in the forecasting is not our understanding of the physics. We have pretty good understanding at this point of how it works. It’s actually our lack of data, our lack of observations. So let’s use the analogy of Earth weather again, right? We have weather balloons, we have the weather stations across the world, we have satellites in space.

[00:52:03] All of these things all provide individual data points where we can see sort of how these weather systems are moving and evolving in real time and predict that. But when we’re looking at the sun, we essentially, most of the time, have a single viewpoint from the Earth looking at the sun. We have one data point, and from that, we have to try and predict all of these things.

[00:52:22] There are some periods where we do have sort of satellites that are outside of this sort of sun-Earth line and can give a sort of a bit of triangulation angle, but those assets are not permanent. They’re not always there. They’re not always reliable, and some of these are pretty old. So at the moment, that’s the biggest limitation is our lack of data.

[00:52:40] We just don’t have it and hopefully we will have it in the next few years, but at the moment, that’s the biggest source of the uncertainty. So I think NOAA, when they give out their prediction times, will say, “Okay, this eruption is gonna hit Earth tomorrow, 6:00 PM. Be ready with your aurora for your aurora photos.”

[00:52:58] There’s sort of a, a 10-hour window either side of that, sort of within their uncertainty range currently.

[00:53:03] Michael Hawk: Yeah, it’s really interesting because even if you talk to a meteorologist, they’re gonna say their limiting factor is data as well, despite having so much data

[00:53:12] Ryan French: Orders of magnitude more data than

[00:53:14] we have.

[00:53:14] Michael Hawk: So it really puts into perspective the type of data you would need. Are there any projects like dedicated satellites or other things in the works to help close that gap a little bit?

[00:53:27] Ryan French: There is. Thankfully, there is. So we are doing a couple of things. The first thing we’re doing is we’re replacing satellites on this sun-Earth line. So this is our sort of single viewpoint. We’re upgrading these to have sort of better resolution take pictures more often, all of these things. But the thing that will be a big game changer is the European Space Agency, in partner with NASA, a partnership with NASA, are launching a satellite called Vigile that is gonna leave the sort of Earth-sun line, if you draw sort of a line between the two, and it’s gonna head behind the Earth, and it’s gonna be permanently located about sort of s- a 60-degree angle away from the sun and the Earth.

[00:54:05] So this will actually kind of give a, a side-on view of this eruption. So instead of just seeing a CME traveling straight towards you, you would actually be seeing it sort of traveling to the side. And if you have these two different viewpoints, you can triangulate a bit more and really get a much better estimate of the angle and the speed and the direction of these things.

[00:54:24] So that’s coming up soon. That’s in development. That will be out there in space ready for the next solar maximum, eight years away and there are other mission ideas in development. The Korean Space Agency, so South Korean agency, they are building a near identical sort of setup to go the other side of the Earth.

[00:54:45] So then we’ll sort of have these three different viewpoints, and that’ll be a massive start. I mean, ideally, in the perfect world, you would just have every 10 degrees, you would have these satellites in a a 360-degree orbit around the sun, and you would just do that a bunch of times.

[00:54:59] You’d do that like by Mercury, do it by Venus, do it by Earth, and get a full map of these things traveling. That’s not gonna happen. But for now, in the next 10 years at least, hopefully we’ll have a couple of more viewpoints.

[00:55:09] Michael Hawk: can dream anyway.

[00:55:10] Ryan French: One can dream.

[00:55:11] Michael Hawk: And that– I’m sorry, one other question I wanna squeeze in thinking about, again, parallels with weather. When we start talking weather, you have, meteorology and climatology, and, climatology is kinda looking at the long-term trends and the overall effects and things like that.

[00:55:26] And back to this idea of solar cycles, I understand that some solar cycles are much more active than other solar cycles. And in general, we’ve been in sort of a decreasing trend. I think that’s maybe reversed a little bit maybe the last cycle or two. But do you– Are you able to predict sort of the strength or activity level of the next cycle?

[00:55:50] Ryan French: This is definitely still very much an ongoing area of research. But you are correct in saying we have these 11-year cycles. We have the peaks of these cycles at solar maximum. Solar maximums are not equal. So we are currently, as I mentioned, coming down the peak from Solar Cycle 25.

[00:56:07] The previous solar cycle in so Solar Cycle 24, which peaked around 2014, was much lower than this current cycle, was much weaker. So even right now as we speak, we have, we’re two years past the peak of the cycle coming up, but we are still seeing more solar activity now, two years past the peak, than we did at the peak back in 2014.

[00:56:28] In general, these peaks have been decreasing since around the 1980s. So sort of 1950s to 1980s, solar activity was increasing, and there actually were people who tried to make a link by saying, “Okay, activity on the sun is increasing. This is probably the cause of climate change here on Earth.

[00:56:46] Temperatures are rising. This is probably due to this, this change in solar activity.” But since the ’80s, solar activity has been going down, so that, that correlation is no longer there, and there’s no longer any argument to be made that the sun is causing climate change. As I mentioned, this, this current peak that we just experienced was bigger than the previous one, and estimates do range, but I think the, the consensus is the next solar cycle will be similar or bigger to this current one, so probably we’re coming out of this period of lower solar activity

[00:57:14] Michael Hawk: Interesting. Yeah, I’m kind of excited to have more activity on the sun. Of course, at the same time not wanting any of these huge disruptive events that come along with it. I want it both ways. Yeah.

[00:57:28] Ryan French: I don’t feel pessimistic about these things. I think our- both our technological infrastructures, just the, the pure technology that we’re building our power grids from is getting better, and our understanding to predict and mitigate these impacts are also improving.

[00:57:44] So I think if we had a, a very large once in 250 year event happen tomorrow, we are in a way better position than if it happened 20 years ago

[00:57:52] Michael Hawk: So obviously you’re a great communicator, as I hope listeners have been able to tell today. And and a scientist and also very active on social media as we’ve alluded to and we’ll link to your socials. But you’re an author too so I would love to hear a little bit about what you’ve been working on, what you’ve published, and what we can look forward to in the future.

[00:58:14] Ryan French: So I guess my proudest recent project was a book that came out just around Christmas time, so earlier this year, the very end of last year. It’s a book called Space Hazards. So it talks about a l- a lot of the things we’ve been talking about here, where it takes things in space, so we talk about the sun and space weather, as well as other things like space junk near-Earth objects, meteorites, and talks about them not just from a scientific perspective, but talks about how things in space can influence our life here on Earth.

[00:58:42] So very much the things we’ve been talking about. That’s called Space Hazards. But also, I’m very excited about this week, as we mentioned before, there is a solar eclipse in the middle of August 12th. I’ve just had a book come out this week called Little Book of Eclipses.

[00:58:56] So it’s co-authored with me and a good friend of mine, and it’s all about solar eclipses, lunar eclipses. W- alongside the aurora, I would say, that we’ve talked about here, probably the most beautiful natural phenomena that we can expect to see, and that’s covered in that book.

[00:59:09] Michael Hawk: Yeah, I’m looking forward to checking these out. I do admit I haven’t had a chance to read either of your books, but they’re definitely on my list now. So I will do that. Do you have any other upcoming projects activities that you want to highlight? Like I– With your social media, are you gonna be…

[00:59:24] are you gonna be like live streaming the event or anything like that?

[00:59:28] Ryan French: Yeah, so this eclipse, I will not be live streaming this one. . This one, pretty excitingly, it’s the day before my 30th birthday. So I decided I’m not gonna work on this eclipse. I’m just gonna hang out with my friends and my family, have a good time. But leading up to the eclipse, I will be pro- producing a lot of social media content, some sort of practical guides, and after the event too, I’ll be doing some reflections and wrap-ups.

[00:59:51] But this is actually just the first of three total eclipses we have in the next three years. So we’ve got a bit of a, a string of these things, so it’s gonna be busy from an eclipse perspective

[01:00:01] Michael Hawk: Lots of fun ahead. I need to plan ahead and actually see one. I, I look, and it’s like, “Oh, if only I didn’t have this commitment or whatever. If only it wasn’t halfway around the world.”

[01:00:14] Ryan French: That’s the tricky thing, yeah.

[01:00:16] Michael Hawk: so, if people do wanna follow your work where are the best places that you would recommend they go?

[01:00:21] Ryan French: you want to go on my website is ryanjfrench.com. That links all of my projects and social media handles and everything. But to be succinct, on Instagram, I’m sun.scientist, and then on TikTok and Twitter and other places, I’m ryanjfrench

[01:00:37] Michael Hawk: So as I said before, I’ll link to those, your books some of those reels of solar flares and, those sort of things. So there’ll be plenty of fun resources in the show notes. So before we adjourn for today is there anything else that you’d like to say?

[01:00:55] Ryan French: I would just say thanks for having me on. I’m, I know we’ve been talking about the space stuff today, but I’m also a massive sort of nature and wildlife guy, so very happy to sort of merge those worlds and be talking to you today.

[01:01:05] Michael Hawk: Very nice. I wish we had more time to talk about that as well, but perhaps another time.

[01:01:11] Ryan French: Perhaps another time. Yeah, absolutely

[01:01:12] Michael Hawk: All right. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate you, the time you’ve spent today, and all the great work that you do

[01:01:17] Ryan French: Thanks a lot

[01:01:17] Michael Hawk: And before we go, special thanks to Kat Ignacek for production assistance with this episode