NASA Warns of Potential "Huge Space Storm" In 2013

Low Ranked Craig writes "Senior space agency scientists believe the Earth will be hit with unprecedented levels of magnetic energy from solar flares after the Sun wakes 'from a deep slumber' sometime around 2013. In a new warning, NASA said the super storm could hit like 'a bolt of lightning' and could cause catastrophic consequences for the world's health, emergency services, and national security — unless precautions are taken. Scientists believe damage could extend to everyday items such as home computers, iPods, and sat navs. 'We know it is coming but we don't know how bad it is going to be,' said Dr. Richard Fisher, the director of NASA's Heliophysics division. 'I believe we're on the threshold of a new era in which space weather can be as influential in our daily lives as ordinary terrestrial weather.' Fisher concludes. 'We take this very seriously indeed.'"

Comments

Invest in FRDY!

[noidentity]

I seriously wonder whether I should purchase a few crate-sized Farady cages in preparation, and ensure I have non-magnetic backups of everything.

Re:Invest in FRDY!

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you have a punchcard to jtag writer, documentation on your cd-rom drive, and of course backups of your bios, you're screwed anyways. Every electronic component you'd use to recover those backups probably has either an eeprom or flash part in it containing the device specific code. In the event of any sort of serious EM pulse that could damage hardware or wipe software you would either have lost or best case had minimally corrupted every device along the chain you'd use for recovery. This actually falls in under 'reasons to have blueprints for your hardware'... if the software were to disappear tomorrow, who would be able to reimplement it in order to help recover all that now-dead hardware?

Why should we expect a worse sun spot maximum?

[CdXiminez]

Why should we expect a worse sun spot maximum than previous maxima?
Nowhere in the two linked articles does it say anything about why it would be worse than 2006.
They don't even talk about the unusually long sun spot miminum we've had.
I was hoping for some science about how that might affect the coming maximum...

Government thinking writ large:

[Rogerborg]

The National Risk Register, established in 2008 to identify different dangers to Britain, also has "comprehensive" plans on how to handle a complete outage of electricity supplies.

Yes, secret plans. Don't worry, when we need to know, they'll be disseminated, presumably by a network of tin cans and bits of string, with a smoke signal backup system.

Re:Scary

[Bakkster]

Big transformers in the power grids will be the main victims. And all of us that rely on having a power grid, of course. As long as you keep a spare car battery to recharge any bionics that require that, and provided that the outage doesn't last too long, I'd expect something like a pacemaker to be just fine.

The issue you refer is to ground loop currents in the electric grid. The storm creates a difference in the ground voltage between different transformers. This creates a massive current that blows out the transformer.

The real issue is that the devices to prevent this (basically huge resistors) are expensive, rare, and take a long time to manufacture. And when we suddenly have half of the transformers in the US explode at once, the outage will not be brief. There is not a large stock of transformers sitting in warehouses as replacements. Transformers take even longer to produce than those resistors, and we would be waiting months before we could repair most of the grid. That's a huge issue.