Scientists are often baffled by large strandings of whales or dolphins, like those that beached themselves off the coast of Namibia, north of Luderitz earlier this month.
A new study published in February in Current Biology suggests that solar storms – which occur when the Sun emits huge bursts of high-energy particles that can affect Earth’s magnetic field – could be one of the causes of these mass strandings.
NOAA Fisheries West Coast/Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Sunspots are an indication of solar storms. According to The New York Times, researchers from the Royal Observatory of Belgium used gray whale stranding data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (over a period of 31 years) and sunspot data from the Royal Observatory of Belgium and noticed that when there were more sunspots on the Sun’s surface gray whales were more likely to get stranded on beaches.
Although not proved yet, researchers suspect that this solar activity could disrupt the whales’ magnetic sense of direction.
