p. 293 | SUN STORMS

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Tuesday, May 12, 1885

FromAdvent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 62, No. 19

SUN STORMS.

THE dissolution of our earth by fire should not seem so impossible an event, in view of what is even now taking place only about ninety-five millions of miles away. One of our recent exchanges gives the following:—

“SUN STORMS.—How can we, who are bewildered and appalled by the fury of our planet’s cyclones and volcanic eruptions, form a conception of the terrible energy of natural operations on the sun? Prof. Newcomb suggests that if we call the solar chromosphere an ocean of fire, we must remember that it is an ocean hotter than the fiercest furnace, and as deep as the Atlantic is broad. If we call its movements hurricanes, we must remember that our hurricanes blow only about a hundred miles an hour, while those of the chromosphere blow as far in a single second. They are such hurricanes as, coming down upon us from the north, would, in thirty seconds after they had crossed the St. Lawrence, be in the Gulf of Mexico, carrying with them the whole surface of the continent in a mass, not simply of rain, but of glowing vapor, in which the vapors arising from the dissolution of the materials composing the cities of Boston, New York, and Chicago, would be mixed in a single indistinguishable cloud. When we speak of eruptions we call to mind Vesuvius burying the surrounding cities in lava; but the solar eruptions, thrown fifty thousand miles high, would engulf the whole earth, and dissolve every organized being on its surface in a moment.”