By Stephanie
Pappas, Live Science Contributor | September 8, 2017 08:16am ET
A solar
storm currently affecting the Earth's high atmosphere could spell bad news for
an unexpected victim: whales.
Recent
research finds that the fatal stranding of 29 whales in
early 2016 could have been caused by solar activity — when mind-boggling
amounts of energy erupt from the sun in various forms. Magnetic waves emanating
from solar storms may affect sperm-whale navigation, that study found. The
navigational confusion can be deadly if whales end up swimming into too-shallow
waters and getting stuck.
Just this
month, on Sept. 4, one type of solar storm, called a coronal mass ejection
(CME), erupted from the sun, according
to the National Space Weather Prediction Center. CMEs
fling charged plasma and magnetic fields from the sun's surface toward Earth,
where they cause fluctuations in the planet's magnetic field. Migratory animals
like sperm whales, birds and sea
turtles all use the geomagnetic field to navigate.
The
possible culprit for last year's sperm whale stranding seems to have occurred
around the period of Jan. 8 to Feb. 4, 2016, when 29 male sperm whales
(Physeter microcephalus) were found dead or dying on the shores of Germany,
France, Great Britain and the Netherlands. Autopsies on 22 of the whales revealed
that the animals were well-nourished and had no signs of illness, according to
the new research paper published
in the International Journal of Astrobiology.
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