On Wed, 26 May 2004 05:27:02 -0500, "Gordon Couger"
wrote:
"Torsten Brinch" wrote in message
.. .
I recall reading an article by someone who had studied a lamination
series in sediment rock (I think the site was down somewhere in the
Flinders Range, but perhaps it is a mix-up in memory with a rather
strange regular lamination I've seen there myself, north of Wilpuna)

Anyhow, in that article the author had meticulously mapped and
measured the laminations in the rock bed laid down over a period of
many hundreds of years, and he indeed linked the patterns in them to
the solar cycle you mention. Of course lamination in _sediment_ rock
could only be linked to the solar cycle by the cycle itself being
linked to rainfall. Another startling thing I remember about his
observations was, that if true, that would mean that our fat old Sun
had very much the same activity cycle when that sediment ws layed
down, many hundreds of thousands of years ago, as it has to this day.
Torsten,

Where was this? I would be very intersted in seeing the work.

Gordon, this was an article I read in Scientific American almost
40 years ago, and I no longer remember the name of the site.
I think the name had 'creek' in it (talk about a minimal clue :-)
and I am pretty sure it was somewhere in the semiarid land north
of Adelaide, in Flinders Range or further out, beyond the black
stump. I got the impression that the site was kinda famous for its
exposure of a very long sediment series with peculiarly regular and
eyecatching laminations in the rock. Again, from memory, the author
argued that the long term stable arid/semiarid climate at the site
was crucial in making it at all possible to discern this alleged
solar cycle influence on the sedimentation -- that is, in a less arid
environment chaotic rainfall would have drowned out the signal.

Linking
sunspots to rainfall in modern times hasn't worked very well on a single
cycle scale in all the work I have seen tried. But linking how energetic the
cycle is to the average global temperature seems to have a pretty high
correlation. Particularly when there is a long run of them that are strong
or weak. The most outstanding being the Maunder Minimum and the Little Ice
age from 1645 to 1715.

Part of the warming in the last century was due to 3 very strong cycles and
I think the reason that the global warming suddenly petered out at the end
of the century was the last cycle was real dud. This cycle started off with
one of the biggest magnetic storms in history at the bottom or the last or
start of the next cycle when the magnetic storms on the sun reversed
direction. There seems to be no way to forecast how strong a cycle will be
except in retrospect.

Gordon