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Geomagnetic Storm To Begin Tonight
Kiel Oleson writes: "According to the Kansas City Star and the Space Environment Center, there is an 80% chance that a series of five geomagnetic storms will disrupt communications and power systems. These storms will hit the earth beginning at 5 PM CST today and ending at 5 PM CST tommorow. There is a 40% chance of there being severe or major disruptions in satellite orbits, electrical grids, and radio. The good side? Some of us may be able to see the Aurora! Get those UPS's charged!" Everyone's cell phone working OK?
The issue is not with mineral deposits in the ground. It's with mulitple-hundred mile long power lines. When you combine a long conductor with a moving magnetic field you can generate some incredible voltages. When the power grid went down last time it was because the generated voltages were large enough to fry the circuit breakers in the power stations. After the first station went down, the others started trying to kick in extra power to compensate. With the extra voltage fluctuations from the magnetic storm, other stations went down. After a few stations were down, the others were unable to provide enough power for the grid, so the whole thing went down.
As to whether they've fixed things so it won't happen again, I guess we'll see tonight.
"Bite me, it's fun!" - Crowe T. Robot
Funny how this has a greater probability of affecting harm to us tonight than y2k did on Dec 31 after all of our preparations, but this probably won't get much press coverage. If it doesn't have a sexy acronym, the major press doesn't seem to latch on to it. (Nothing against the Kansas City paper, of course.)
What's your damage, Heather?
The office of the US Press Secretary, late at night...
/etc/home/press.
/etc/home/press/bulletins.
Bob the Assistant: Mr Secretary, the, um, special official space bulletins have been uploaded into your account for you to check before release.
Secretary: Thanks Bob.
WHUX - White House Unix (c) (tm), version 6.0 ("Kissinger" release)
(Unix is a registered trademark of AT&T.)
Username: press
Password: ***
$ go to home
Current directory is
$ go to bulletins
Current directory is
$ run "s/extraterrestrial interference/misuse of the metric system/i; s/impending alien invasion/geomagnetic storm/" on all files
Changes effected.
$ send all files to newswire
Email sent.
$ shut down
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
I saved this from the last solar storm story on slashdot. (hey, alliteration!)
http://www.sec.noaa.gov/pmap/pmapN.html& lt;/a>
Shows the level of auroral activity in the northern hemisphere. Click around for a southern hemisphere view, ya' lazy bastards.
Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from Gods.
There was a geomagnetic storm over western Chicago about 7-8 months ago. That night I was sitting at my computer, when all the sudden I saw a bright flash outside a window to my left. I figured it was raining, and it was a lightning strike.
A few minutes later, a brownout occurred and my computer rebooted. This happened continuously for about an hour, and after the third instance I just turned it off. At this point I went into my living room, when the power went totally out. I was sitting on my couch in total darkness when suddenly there was a BRIGHT GREEN flash from the window. This was too weird. I had to go outside.
I found that it had become extremely cold. The green flashes continued, and I also started hearing noises not unlike circuits being grounded. That stereotypical zap-zap noise. I must have stayed outside for an hour wondering how often something like that actually happens. I still had no idea what the hell it was, until I remembered that there was a Coronal Mass Ejection the previous night. It was a plasma storm!