Slashdot Mirror
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
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!