© Dan Kitwood/GettySperm whales stranded at Skegness on England's North Sea coast in January 2016.
In early 2016 a spate of sperm whale strandings in the North Sea perplexed scientists. Many theories were proposed for why 29 of the huge marine mammals - all males, most relatively young - died on European beaches in the course of January and the first few days of February, ranging from poisoning by pollutants to climate-change-induced dislocation.
According to a paper
published in the International Journal of Astrobiology, however, the real cause was not human activity of any sort - it wasn't even on Earth.
Instead, the
authors propose that solar storms threw off the navigation systems of the whales and led them to become lost and stranded. Solar storms, caused by ejections of charged particles from the Sun, disrupt the Earth's magnetic field, especially near the poles, where they are also responsible for producing auroras.
Lead author Klaus Heinrich Vanselow of Christian-Albrechts-Universität in Kiel, Germany, had earlier found
correlations between solar activity and recorded numbers of North Sea sperm whale strandings over several centuries of historical records. The new study is the first to connect specific strandings to specific solar activity, however.
Comment: See also: Australia shivers through coldest start to September EVER: Freezing weather and record Spring snowfall turns coastal towns white