All surfers can agree on one thing: we need storms to survive. Surfers are nothing without waves, and waves are naught without storms. Some storms are obnoxious and travel too close to shore ruining what would have been an otherwise perfect 6-foot swell. Some storms build into hurricanes and typhoons causing millions in damages, but to the surfer in us all ultimately represent just another chance to catch some waves. Most storms set up decently enough though, and send us the savory fruit of their labor in some form of surfable wave.
As surfers, we flip open our computers and devour salacious tales of storms-a-brewing. “Storm tracking this…” and “…low-pressure…” that, get our minds racing with the possible waves these storms will produce. So where does your mind go as a surfer when your friend sends you an article from Discovery.com. hyping up the possibility of the largest storm our little blue planet has ever seen? And this is no ordinary storm, it’s a solar storm. Well, if you’re me, you start thinking of what kind of waves this storm could potentially produce.
Now solar storms aren’t that uncommon. I mean our sun is really a big soupy mess made up of mainly hydrogen and helium. All this sloshing makes for some pretty wicked storms, which can result in solar flares being shot out like your chubby cousin’s soda brewed belch. Weird gases in, shake, and hope you aren’t in the direct line of fire when the eruption is launched. Historically, a small portion of these solar flares have run into earth with quite noticeable effect, not unlike your cousin’s belch, which gets everyone’s attention in a 200 meter radius.
Now the odds of the solar flare hitting earth are kind of like the winter in the North Pacific. So imagine you’re a surfer on the West Coast of California watching a storm brew over by Japan and you’re just praying is sends waves in the right swell window to light up your favorite point break. Sometimes you win, and sometimes you end up driving down to Mexico because the angle was all wrong for anywhere near you. The solar flares can be imagined in the same way that these swell events sometimes hit, and sometimes miss, and both are products of some very stormy activity. Trouble is, even with modern scientific achievements, the ability to forecast the exact track of a solar flare is extremely difficult.
Which brings us to the Mayans and their super-duper circular calendar. What the Mayan’s saw was a correlation between solar flares and crop failure, and if you live in an agrarian society that’s a pretty huge thing. So the Mayan’s built their calendar with these solar flares in mind. They wanted the ability to predict when an impending solar flare, and thus crop failure, were set to occur, so they could store crops from a previous harvest insuring a consistent food source. The accuracy of the calendar is still up for debate, and so is the contested declaration that the calendar ends, by some estimates, on December, 21 2012 with one final solar flare. So what’s it all mean for our solar-storm-surfing-forecast?
Well solar flares not only cause crop failure, they cause satellite damage, communication issues, all kinds of fun stuff for our modern technological age. Days without cell coverage and Internet failure scattered over the last decade have already proven the vast impact that solar flares exert on our little planet. What is more intriguing to me though, is a report (this isn’t the exact report, which is only accessible through University and research portals, but is another closely related study and here’s another less scientific site that gives you an idea about the tone of the dialogue that these reports inspire: ) I read in college while studying the brain’s rhythms. It was there that I learned of an intriguing hypothesis that set about examining the possible effects of solar flares on mental institutions. The report showed a direct correlation between solar flares hitting earth and a statistically significant increase in the number of incidents (people acting out) at mental institutions. Basically, in my interpretation, the solar flares seemed to be making the crazies crazier (or if you want the more scientific approach, there was nothing to say this was a causal relationship, which necessitates experimental controls beyond our power: i.e. the ability to manufacture solar flares).
So the implication here is that solar flares have the power to effect human psychology. A solar flare of significant magnitude could just wipe the slate clean, or what? What kind of sensorial frying pan would we be subject to? No one really has the answer to these kinds of questions, but no proper scientist would deny the very real possibilities implied. I do know though, that as surfers, our psychology is constantly focused on riding out the off-products of storm events, so why not suggest that our brains would be best suited for surfing the myriad of wavelengths that a solar flare carries.
I’m not trying to say that this is where we’re all headed on planet earth in the year 2012. Any number of flaws can be poked in this theory, but for me as a surfer, I can’t say the idea doesn’t excite me just a little. You know those days when a mystery swell lights up a surf spot you’ve never seen break before, never even considered before? Well this could be just like that, except with our brains.
