The sun periodically throws cosmic tantrums and produces solar storms—streams of radiation and charged particles that affect Earth’s magnetic field. Such storms could conceivably mess up the compasses of magnetically sensitive whales, and if these animals are close to a shoreline, even a small navigational error might send them aground. To test this idea, Granger collated 33 years’ worth of records of healthy, uninjured gray whales inexplicably stranding themselves. She compared the timing of these incidents to data on solar activity, wrangled by her astronomer colleague Lucianne Walkowicz. A
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