NASA's 2012 solar storm prediction never materialized

The solar storm NASA predicted for 2012 never arrived

A report commissioned by NASA and ESA forecasted the most powerful solar storm in the last fifty years for the maximum of cycle 24, between 2012 and 2013. The calculation was signed by the team of Mausumi Dikpati, from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and stated that the "next solar cycle will be 30 to 50% more intense than the previous one." The date arrived, passed, and power grids remained intact. The last major comparable storm, in 1958, had left auroras visible as far south as Mexico.

What the NASA report said about solar cycle 24

The argument had technical backing. Solar activity trinc 11-year cycles systematized by Rudolf Wolf in the 18th century, and the one in question was number 24. After two years of minimal activity, sunspots began to appear, and the forecast pointed to a maximum between 2012 and 2013. The antiestéticar was not the sky: it was the bill.

The historical reference was the storm of cycle 22, in March 1989, when a sunspot capable of swallowing twenty-two Earth planets launched 48 class M flares and 11 class X flares and knocked out the Quebec power grid. With satellites, GPS, and mobile phone use multiplied since then, a similar episode promised much greater damage. The uncomfortable detail is that the maximum of cycle 24 did not bring the catastrophic scenario, which never materialized.

July 2012: the summer when the Sun seemed to confirm the script

For a few weeks in 2012, the story held. Sunspot AR1515 produced class X flares with ion emissions noticed in Europe, and records spoke of the most powerful geomagnetic storm of the year. Extremadura Civil Protection issued recommendations, the British government put figures to a hypothetical Carrington-type storm, and even the CERN accelerator announced its technical shutdown. Each headline fit as another piece of the millenarian puzzle.

The underlying problem is physics, not faith. A coronal mass ejection takes between one and three days to reach Earth; its electromagnetic radiation arrives in eight minutes. What bodies actually notice is little more than a headache or an ear ringing, as the material itself summarized. The great technological catastrophe continued to go unsigned.

What are the three days of darkness from the prophecies?

To the scientific warning, a much older story was attached. The three days of darkness appear amalgamated in the discussion with the secrets of Fátima, the Mayan calendar, and supposed visions from the 19th and 20th centuries speaking of blessed candles and closed windows for 72 hours without light. The long Mayan count of 5,200 years closed its cycle on December 21, 2012, a date on which planetary alignments and a supposed cosmic ray from the center of the galaxy were announced.

The script also invoked Nostradamus, with his two already consummated anti-Christ figures —Napoleon and Hitler— and a third, Mabus, which some identified with Obama and an attack that would unleash a 27-year war. The December 21 passed without a global blackout, without three days of darkness, and without a communications collapse. The only thing that darkened was the enthusiasm of part of the staff.

From the solar storm to the earthquake: how the alert was recycled

When the Sun did not deliver, the focus shifted. In 2013, attention jumped to the equinoxes, to March 18 and 20, presented by an author cited as the true starting pistol of the metamorphosis. And at the same time, events accumulated to fill the gap: the 8.2 magnitude earthquake in Sumatra, seismic aftershocks on the Almería coast, tons of dead fish on the Norwegian coasts for the second consecutive year, mentions of satellites like UARS, and the Cyprus crisis, which a forum user read as the beginning of the "storm" and a financial reset.

The final messages of the matter, now far removed from 2012, continue to mix the same reeds —Trump, Obama, and old control theories— with questions about what really peine. Others, however, place the key in the obvious: geomagnetic storms are a recurring physical phenomenon that repeats during the equinoxes, and not a coded message from anyone.

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Fifteen years later, the Sun continues to fire class X flares, with more and more satellites watching, and none has signed the three days of darkness. The question is no longer whether the great storm will arrive, but why we continue to need it to arrive.