Solar Storms & Navigation

[GordMay]

Solar storms are a variety of eruptions of mass and energy from the solar surface. Flares, prominences, sunspots, coronal mass ejections are the common harbingers of solar activity, as are plages and other related phenomena seen at other wavelengths. They all involve sudden releases of stored magnetic energy, which accelerates the hot gases near the surface or in the corona of the Sun. Sometimes these particles make it all the way to the Earth and beyond, by flowing along the Sun's magnetic field into interplanetary space.
When the material collides with the Earth's magnetic field and trapped radiation belts, it can dump particles into our upper atmosphere, to cause the Aurora.
The same 'charged' particles can produce their own magnetic fields which can modify the Earth's magnetic field and affect compass readings. For hundreds of years, magnetic the fields of the Earth were the primary means of determining your bearing, using an ordinary compass. These fields can, however, be affected by solar storms, which cause' magnetic storms, that can change the local direction to the magnetic pole by many degrees, for periods of several hours or even days.
The changing magnetic fields can also 'induce' electricity in long pipelines, or produce electrical surges in our power grids leading to brown outs and black outs.

Solar storms may be linked to mass grey whale strandings
➥ https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/g...orms-1.5480178

“Gray whales strand more often on days with increased levels of atmospheric radio-frequency noise” ~! By Jesse Granger et al.
➥https://www.cell.com/current-biology...28-2#back-bib4

See also:
Solar flares send navigators off in the wrong direction ➥ https://www.newscientist.com/article...ong-direction/
Influence of Magnetic Storms on Compass ➥ http://www.viviss.si/download/viviss...aper_11_20.pdf