Massive solar flares, mental health in the time of coronavirus (and all the time) and the epigenetics of trauma.
The Carrington Event
Taylor Quimby & Sam Evans-Brown
In late summer of 1859, amateur astronomer Richard Carrington was making observations of the sun when he saw a bright flash of light. Solar flares are common on the sun, but this one was especially powerful.
“Typically, there are flares, large emissions of light from the sun, every day. But they are mostly visible in the UV and X-ray vision, so unless you have an extra filter, which at the time people didn’t have," explained Noe Lugaz of the Space Science Center at the University of New Hampshire. "But this one was so bright that you actually see it in the emission of the sun, just like a light bulb exploding, so it’s something you [could see] with the naked eye without any equipment.”
What followed, over the next few nights, were some of the most brilliant and perplexing displays of the Northern Lights ever documented. Newspapers and weather observers described brilliant auroras from Canada to Cuba, from Japan to Australia. This peculiar display is what we now call, “The Carrington Event.”
Today we understand that the Carrington Event was caused by a CME, or coronal mass ejection. These solar explosions send particles flying out into space and are very common. However, very large CMEs that strike the Earth can have all sorts of impacts on modern technology that weren’t around when Carrington was alive - namely GPS, radio signals, satellites, and electrical grids.
Scientists have warned that the impact from a “Carrington-Level CME” could be catastrophic for the United States. But, as society has recently discovered with the Covid-19 pandemic, preparing for inevitable but rare disasters is a complicated business.
Featuring Noe Lugaz, David Wade, Ilan Kellman, Anita Chandra, Gilbert Sybille, and John Kappenman.
Mental health in the time of disaster
Justine Paradis
A massive solar flare is, of course, not the only large-scale disaster that many of us could be facing in our lifetimes. Climate change presents a number of grim possibilities, like sea level rise and increasingly unpredictable weather events, not to mention the ongoing coronavirus pandemic: an invisible but ever-present life-threatening danger.
All that ambient noise affects our brains.
"It constantly keeps our brain in a panic mode," said Stephanie Foo. She's a journalist, former producer for This American Life and Snap Judgment, and a Rosalynn Carter 2019/2020 Mental Health Fellow. She's writing a book about what it's like to heal from Complex PTSD, a form of post-traumatic stress disorder caused when trauma is recurring - like in cases of child abuse or neglect.
"When we’re afraid, our bodies and our brains pump stress chemicals through our body, like cortisol and adrenaline. These activate panic centers in our brain," said Foo. "They can turn off our prefrontal cortex, which is the part of our brain that controls logic and reasoning and set off our amygdala, which is the part of the brain that controls the fight or flight response."
Last year, Foo wrote an article for Vox, titled “My PTSD can be a weight. But in this pandemic, it feels like a superpower,” where she explored how her response to the pandemic helped her rethink her experiences with C-PTSD. She writes about how she sees her own PTSD as a resource to help others cope with mental health crises, and her hope that the pandemic could be an opportunity for empathy and the erasure of shame around mental health issues.
"I really think that trauma is the most contagious disease there is," said Foo. "When you have so much trauma abounding, the way to prevent that trauma from having these shock waves of hurt that just keep resonating within our community is to protect mental health...so instead we are able to spread kindness."
The Legacy of Trauma: Can Experiences Leave a Biological Imprint?
Maddie Sofia, Ariela Zebede, and Brit Hanson
This story, from our friends at NPR’s daily science podcast Short Wave, investigates whether trauma – the kind experienced by veterans of war, natural disaster, or perhaps survivors of global pandemic – could leave a biological echo that gets passed down from generation to generation.
Featuring Bianca Jones Marlin and Brian Dias.
You can find Bianca @bjmarlin, Brian @DiasDigresses, Ariela @arielazebede, Brit @bnhanson, and host Maddie @maddie_sofia on Twitter.
This episode of Short Wave was produced by Brit Hanson, fact-checked by Berly McCoy, and edited by Viet Le. The audio engineer for this episode was Daniel Shukhin.
