Sunspot Strandings

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Sunspot Strandings

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概要

California gray whales, like several other whale species, migrate from arctic feeding grounds in summer to warm equatorial waters in winter to birth their young. This migration can be more than 13,000 miles—the longest on Earth. Scientists think they may use magnetoreception, navigating according to Earth’s magnetic field. New findings somewhat corroborate that, but with a wrinkle we can’t explain. It’s not uncommon that whales will get lost or injured along the route, strand themselves on the coast, and die. A third of the dead whales found are emaciated, suggesting they starved. Some researchers hypothesize that their population, which, remarkably, has rebounded to pre-whaling numbers, has simply reached the carrying capacity of their environment. Others suggest warming polar seas might be producing less food for them. But some of these dead whales were perfectly healthy and may have simply become disoriented. Scientists wondered why. They studied stranding events going back 30 years and found nearly 200 healthy whales had beached. Looking for correlations, they found this was four times as likely to happen during periods of high sunspot activity. Sunspots that merely disrupted Earth’s magnetic field didn’t appear unusually fatal. But sunspots that also released bursts of radio static seemed to interfere with the whales’ sense of navigation, perhaps blocking their ability to read magnetic signals… Or interfering with some new navigational sense we don’t yet understand.

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