Month: May 2025

Trees Remember an Ice Age Solar Storm

/ Dr.Tony Phillips / Leave a comment

May 21, 2025: (Spaceweather.com) More than 14 thousand years ago, there was a solar storm so big, trees still remember it. Dwarfing modern solar storms, the event would devastate technology if it happened again today. Spoiler alert: It could.


Above: Subfossil trees along the banks of the Drouzet river in France [ref]

The record-strong storm is described by a paper in the upcoming July 2025 edition of the peer-reviewed journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters. It occured in 12,350 BC and is classified as a “Miyake Event.”

Miyake Events are solar storms that make the Carrington Event of 1859 look puny. Trees “remember” them in their rings, which store the carbon-14 created by gargantuan storms. At least six Miyake Events have been discovered and confirmed since Fusa Miyake found the first one in 2012. The list so far includes 664-663 BC, 774 AD, 993 AD, 5259 BC, 7176 BC, and 12,350 BC.

The Miyake Event of 12,350 BC is especially intriguing. It appears as a carbon-14 spike in Scots Pine trees along the banks of the Drouzet river in France, with a matching beryllium-10 spike in Greenland ice cores. The event was global and, based on the size of the spikes, very big.

At first, no one could say how big the storm was because it happened during the Ice Age.

Carbon-14 storage is complicated. When a solar storm creates carbon-14 in the upper atmosphere, the radioisotope doesn’t immediately appear in the woody flesh of trees. Getting there involves months to years of atmospheric circulation influenced by climate and geography, and even then the carbon-14 has to arrive during the tree’s growing season, otherwise it won’t be “taken up.” High-altitude trees are favored because they encounter the carbon-14 first, while different species each have their own sensitivity.

All these factors are a harder to tease out in the Ice Age. Most known Miyake Events occurred after the Ice Age, during the Holocene, a period of relatively stable and warm climate starting about 12,000 years ago. Climate scientists have atmospheric circulation models for the Holocene, so interpreting Miyake Events in 7176 BC, 5259 BC, 664-663 BC, 993 AD, 774 AD was relatively straightforward. Not so, the event of 12,350 BC.

To solve this problem, Kseniia Golubenko and Ilya Usoskin from the University of Oulu in Finland developed a chemistry-climate model (SOCOL:14C-Ex) specifically for Ice Age solar storms. It takes into account ice sheet boundaries, sea levels, and geomagnetic fields that existed during the Pleistocene’s Late Glacial period. Using this model, they were able to interpret tree ring data for 12,350 BC.

According to their paper, 12,350 BC is the biggest Miyake Event yet.  It produced a hailstorm of solar particles 500 times greater than the most intense solar particle storm recorded by modern satellites in 2005. During the 2005 event, an airline passenger flying over the poles might have received a year’s worth of sea-level cosmic radiation in just one hour. During the 12350 BC event, the same dose would have been received in a mere eight seconds.

This would seem to set a new standard for worst-case scenarios in space weather. However, the real news is deeper: The door to the Ice Age has been kicked open by SOCOL:14C-Ex. Older tree rings may now be interpreted with confidence, potentially revealing even worse storms.

Stay tuned for more news from the trees.

The Electric Forest: Trees Respond to a Solar Eclipse

/ Dr.Tony Phillips / Leave a comment

May 12, 2025 (Spaceweather.com): Solar eclipses aren’t just for homo sapiens. Researchers have long known that birds, insects, and many mammals pay attention when the Moon slides in front of the sun. Now we can add trees to the list.

Above: The study’s location in the Dolomite Mountains of Italy. Photo credit: Monica Gagliano

A paper just published in the journal Royal Society Open Science reports the extraordinary reaction of an Italian mountain forest to a partial eclipse on Oct. 25, 2022. Electrical signals inside spruce trees began to pulse in unison, with older trees seeming to anticipate the eclipse before it happened.

This is unconventional research, and it may challenge what some readers think about trees. However, it is serious work conducted by experts in plant communication and published in a peer-reviewed journal of the Royal Society.

The paper reports how scientists led by Alessandro Chiolerio of the Italian Institute of Technology and Monica Gagliano of Southern Cross University attached electrodes to three Norway spruce trees and five tree stumps. Their device is like an EKG for trees. The trees were different ages, ranging from 20 to 70 years old, allowing the team to compare how age might influence bioelectrical responsiveness to the eclipse.


Above: Electrodes connected to the spruce trees during the eclipse. Photo credit: Monica Gagliano

As the eclipse approached, electrical signals from different trees began to align; their waveforms became more similar in shape and timing. This synchronization peaked during the eclipse and gradually diminished afterward. The older trees started showing electrical changes earlier, hours before the eclipse began, while the youngest tree responded later and more weakly. The tree stumps also exhibited a bioelectrical response, albeit less pronounced than in the standing trees.

The researchers interpreted this as a coordinated “organism-like” response to a large-scale environmental event, possibly involving communication or shared signaling pathways. 

The idea that trees may “talk” to one another is key to the burgeoning field of plant communication. A growing body of research (especially since the 1990s) suggests that trees form symbiotic relationships with fungi, creating vast underground networks called the “Wood Wide Web.” Through these networks, trees exchange nutrients, water, and even chemical signals. They also reportedly recognize their own young and give preferential treatment to kin. Even tree stumps may retain connections to this network.

“Basically, we are watching the famous ‘Wood Wide Web’ in action!” says Gagliano.

Although the researchers successfully detected electrical activity in the trees, they have no idea what was being said–if anything. Perhaps it was simply a basic response to changes in temperature or light levels (about 1/3rd of the sun was covered during the eclipse). The researchers don’t yet speak the “language” of arboreal electricity, so they can’t decipher what they overheard. Repeating the experiment in different forests during more eclipses may be revealing.

Stay tuned for updates from the forest.

Recommended reading: Two good introductory books on plant communication and networking are “Finding the Mother Tree” by Suzanne Simard and “The Light Eaters” by Zoe Schlanger.