Title: "Storm Worlds: Cosmic Fire"
Source: National Geographic
Aired: 05/18/10
Keywords: ice cores, dri, joe mcconnell, nasa, solar flares, coronal mass ejection
Affiliation: DHS
Contact(s): Joe McConnell
Description: In 1859, a massive solar flare from the sun –called a coronal mass ejection– may have plunged large parts of the Earth into darkness for up to a decade. When high-energy solar particles rain down on Earth's atmosphere, they smash the air molecules apart. These recombine to form nitrates, which dissolve in snowflakes and fall to earth on the polar ice cap. Every snowfall adds another layer of ice. Then scientists can extract ice cores for analysis.

DRI's hydrologist Joe McConnell has a freezer full of century old ice cores from Greenland. "The beauty of an ice core is it actually records the chemistry of the atmosphere," says McConnell

Bruce Turatani is a space-weather scientist from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He hopes to find nitrates from the 1859 solar storm trapped in McConnell's ice. "Ice cores can help us go back hundreds of years. This opens up a whole new field of research. DRI's lab can do things no one else can do."