Quote:The sun's activity is in free fall, according to a leading space physicist. But don't expect a little ice age. "Solar activity is declining very fast at the moment," Mike Lockwood, professor of space environmental physics at Reading University, UK, told New Scientist. "We estimate faster than at any time in the last 9300 years."

Lockwood and his colleagues are reassessing the chances of this decline continuing over decades to become the first "grand solar minimum" for four centuries. During a grand minimum the normal 11-year solar cycle is suppressed and the sun has virtually no sunspots for several decades. This summer should have seen a peak in the number of sunspots, but it didn't happen.

Lockwood thinks there is now a 25 per cent chance of a repetition of the last grand minimum, the late 17th century Maunder Minimum, when there were no sunspots for 70 years. Two years ago, Lockwood put the chances of this happening at less than 10 per cent

(11-03-2013, 04:05 PM)Parsons Wrote: Solar / sunspot activity has been quite erratic. There is also a theory that it is double-peaked which seems like it may be the case. Activity was fairly high all the way up through early 2013. It then completely flat-lined until about a month ago when it picked up quite a lot. In the past few weeks, there has been a fairly large amount of sunspot and certainly a lot of X-class CME/solar flares.

It seems like the scenario from the article you posted could happen, but at this point, it could go any way.