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From: josh@polaris.UUCP (Josh Knight)
Newsgroups: net.astro
Subject: Re: StarDate: July 8 The Solar Corona (history of Solar Activity)
Message-ID: <169@polaris.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 25-Jul-85 13:56:33 EDT
Article-I.D.: polaris.169
Posted: Thu Jul 25 13:56:33 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 28-Jul-85 06:47:45 EDT
References: <320@utastro.UUCP> <713@lsuc.UUCP>
Reply-To: josh@polaris.UUCP (Josh Knight)
Organization: IBM Research, Yorktown Heights, N.Y.
Lines: 32
Summary: 

In article <713@lsuc.UUCP> msb@lsuc.UUCP (Mark Brader|LSUC|Toronto) writes:
 
 > My source for all this is the article "The Case of the Missing Sunspots",
 > by John A. Eddy, in Scientific American, May 1977, p.80.  Eddy was the
 > second rediscoverer, after Maunder (mentioned above).  Anyone know of
 > further developments since then?
 
The Maunder minimum is observed in ice cores, I believe from both Greenland
and Antartica.  Solar activity also produces the C14 (i.e. the radioactive
isotope of Carbon used for dating) in the earth's atmosphere and the
calibration of the Carbon dating scheme with continuous/overlapping
tree ring records back some 5000 years can be used to infer solar activity
over that time.  I'm not sure (can't read the papers right now, just
have references listed in my thesis without article titles), but I think
one of the articles:
 
 Science Vol. 192, p. 1189, 1976, by J.A. Eddy
      or
 Science Vol. 198, p. 824, 1977, by J.A. Eddy, P.A. Gilman and D.E. Trotter
 
(probably the first) talks about what can be inferred about solar activity
in the long term.  I seem to remember that there were controversial findings
of 11 year cycles in tree rings by an acknowledged expert on the topic (tree
rings, weather etc.) and these would most likely be before the Maunder Minimum.
None of this is "since" the SciAm article, but more recent papers are more
likely to cite the Science articles (and therefore be traceable via the science
citation index) than the SciAm article.
-- 

		Josh Knight, IBM T.J. Watson Research
    josh at YKTVMH on BITNET, josh.yktvmh.ibm-sj on CSnet,
    ...!philabs!polaris!josh