“This extreme minimum has important implications for the solar dynamo for solar activity and perhaps even for terrestrial climate,” comments solar physicist Spiro Antiochos of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The dynamo is the roiling motions of gas inside the sun that generate the sun’s magnetic field.
Because the magnetic field at solar minimum acts as the seed field for the next minimum, “it may well be that the next cycle will be low, which could have a cooling effect on terrestrial weather," Antiochos says. "There appears to be evidence for a correlation between lack of activity and terrestrial cooling.” Such cooling was observed during an extended period of unusually low solar activity about 300 years ago known as the Maunder Minimum
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