There will be another Mini Ice Age in the year 2030 – the last one was 300 years ago.
The conditions predicted have not been experienced since the last “mini ice age” which lasted from 1645 to 1715, called the Maunder Minimum.
The earth is 15 years from a “mini ice-age” that will cause sulkily cold winters during which rivers such as the Thames freeze over, scientists have predicted. Scientists have said, “There will be a “mini ice age” in 2030”.
Solar researchers at the University of Northumbria have fashioned a new model of the sun’s activity which they claim produces “unprecedentedly precise predictions”. They said watery movements within the sun, which are thought to create 11-year cycles in the weather, will congregate in such a way that temperatures will fall considerably in the 2030s.
Solar activity will drop by 60 per cent as two waves of fluid “effectively cancel each other out”, according to Prof Valentina Zharkova. In a presentation to the National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno, she said the consequence would be alike to freezing conditions of the late 17th century.
Valentina said “In the cycle between 2030 and around 2040 the two waves exactly reflect each other – peaking at the same time but in opposite hemispheres of the sun.
Their contact will be disturbing, or they will almost abandon each other. We forecast that this will direct to the properties of a ‘Maunder minimum’”.
In the year 1843 scientists first revealed that the sun’s activity varies over a cycle of 10 to 12 years. Fluctuations within that cycle have been difficult to guess, although many solar physicists new that the variations were caused by a dynamo of moving solution deep inside the sun.
Maunder minimum, representing low sunspot activity, was the name given to the period between 1645 and 1715, when Europe and North America experienced very chilly winters.
In England during this “Little Ice Age”, River Thames frost fairs were held. In the winter of 1683-84 the Thames froze over for seven weeks, during which it was “drivable by foot”, according to historical records.
Prof Zharkova said scientists had known about one dynamo caused by convicting fluids deep within the sun, but her study appeared to have discovered another.
“We found magnetic wave mechanism appearing in pairs, originating in two different layers in the sun’s interior,” she said.
Professor Zharkova’s team of researchers has found that adding a second dynamo close to the surface of the sun, creates a far more precise model. The scientists found magnetic waves in two different layers of the sun’s interior which vary between the northern and southern hemispheres of the sun. Combining both waves together and comparing to real data for the current solar cycle, we found that our predictions showed an accuracy of 97 per cent.”
They both have a frequency of around 11 years, although this frequency is slightly different, and they are balance in time.
“Effectively, when the waves are roughly in phase, they can show strong interaction, or character, and we have strong solar activity,” Prof Zharkova said.
“When they are out of phase, we have solar minimums. When there is full phase separation, we have the conditions last seen during the Maunder minimum, 370 years ago.”
The magnetic wave patterns show that there will be fewer sunspots in the next two solar cycles. Cycle 25, which peaks in 2022 and Cycle 26, from 2030 to 2040 will both have a major fall in solar activity.
