Duke researcher looks at how solar storms affect whales' natural GPS

Whales are stranding themselves and scientists want to know why. A Duke Ph.D. candidate published a study that suggests radio noise from solar storms may blind whales' natural magnetoreceptors causing them to steer off course.

Posted 4:58 p.m. Mar 2, 2020 — Updated 4:58 p.m. Mar 2, 2020

Tony Rice

, WRAL contributor/NASA ambassador

A gray whale and her calft migrate north along the California coast on their way to summer feeding grounds in the Arctic.

Scientists have been wondering for years why otherwise healthy gray whales are stranding themselves. 2019 was a particularly bad year with dozens dying along the west coast from Mexico to Alaska. So many that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) fisheries division declared an unusual mortality event.

Jesse Granger, a Ph.D. in Biology at Duke, collaborated with Dr. Lucianne Walkowicz of the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, known for her research in stars magnetic activity, on a paper published in Current Biology Magazine that takes another look at sunspots for clues.

Using more than 30 years of NOAA data focusing in on the 186 cases that have puzzled scientists the most. where there was no signs of illness, injury or human interaction. Weather patterns in the Pacific such as El Nino were also excluded.

Previous studies found a link between standings and the number of visible sunspots. This suggested that temporary shifts in the Earth's magnetic field line, by as much as 250 miles, was impacting whales' natural navigation abilities. But the latest data suggested something else.

Sunspots are areas of the Sun’s surface, many as big as the Earth itself which appear darker because they are much as 2,000 degrees cooler than the rest of the photosphere. Interactions with the Sun’s magnetic fields bottles up tremendous amounts of energy like a shaken soda can. When those magnetic field lines become unstable and break, that energy gets release all at once.

Sunspot activity is at a minimum, consistent with minimum in the 26 year solar cycle, but that is expected to change over the coming months and years.

Sunspot AR1944 captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory in January 2014. Earth for scale (Image: NASA/SDO)

"It wasn't until Dr. Walkowicz mentioned that solar storms also produce high amounts of radio-frequency noise, and I remembered this noise can disrupt magnetic orientation" recalled Granger.

They found no significant increase in strandings on days with large deviations in the magnetic field. Instead, the data showed not only did strandings more than double on days with high sunspot counts, they more than quadrupled with the solar storms associated with those sunspots were emitting high amounts of radio noise.

"I thought at first the cause of these strandings was inaccurate information, the whale's GPS thought it was on 4th street when it was really on 6th, but the whales' receptor itself, its GPS, may be blinded by radio noise from these solar storms" Granger said.

Granger also says it's important to keep in mind that this isn't the only cause of strandings. Strandings have many other causes, such as mid-frequency naval sonar. More than half the U.S. Navy's surface fleet uses the technology to search for ultra-quiet submarines. These sonars are capable of sound levels rivaling a Saturn V rocket at launch according to environmental groups.

Going forward, Granger plans to expand her research to other whale species elsewhere in the world. Overall she says she is excited to look for solutions to problems that humans face by understanding how nature has been solving them for a long time.

Why solar storms from space may blind and strand whales

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