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When Space Weather Attacks Earth
Lasrick writes "Brad Plumer details the 1859 solar storm known as the Carrington Event. Pretty fascinating stuff: 'At the time, it was a dazzling display of nature. Yet if the same thing happened today, it would be an utter catastrophe...That's not a lurid sci-fi fantasy. It's a sober new assessment by Lloyd's of London, the world's oldest insurance market. The report notes that even a much smaller solar-induced geomagnetic storm in 1989 left 6 million people in Quebec without power for nine hours.'"
9 hours no electricity? what a catastrophe. I've done that for 9, 18, 24 or so hours, it was called camping
@Valentinial
I always hear about solar flares/storms etc. and the damage they can/will cause, but I have never once been affected by them. Seems like much ado about nothing.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Dooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooommmmmmmmmmmmmmm!!!
We is all gonna die?
*Rolleyes*
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The Carrington Event caused aurora borealis to be visible around the world. I'm not aware of anything else like that being reported in recorded human history. Even if it had happened before the development of writing, you would think it would be the sort of thing that would have a major impact on legends across all world cultures. So my best guess is that from the span of time from, let's say, 3000BC to 2013AD, this has happened exactly once.
Wikipedia says that ice core studies show that events like this which produce high energy protons comparable to the Carrington Event occur with a frequency of roughly once every 500 years, however it briefly mentions that these other events aren't necessarily comparable in terms of geomagnetic impact.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
Space weather
In Quebec, they make as much use of hydroelectric power generated on northern rivers as they can. They use it for normal uses of electricity, but also for heat (where you might use natural gas or heating oil otherwise). They carry it over long distances by way of large (somewhat unsightly) power pylons/transmission towers. Acting as a wonderful antenna, these exposed, unshielded power conduits are exposed to solar radiation, and also ice (see ice storm, 1998). If you have a localized source of power, you will not likely notice the affects as much.
Or we could start protecting our central power infrastructure the same way most homes are protected - by having it switch off rather than blow up when overloaded for any reason.
The last time someone got wound up about this on Slashdot. And, last time around, I linked the PJM power grid training document on geo-magnetic disturbances. They know about the Carrington Event. They know all about the problem in 1989, which happened on their system and damaged some transformers.
The problem shows up as DC current on long AC lines, because voltage at "ground" differs across points hundreds of miles apart. This can damage transformers. So they have DC current monitoring in place at some key points on their system. Corrective action is taken when "DC measurement of 10 amps or greater measured at Missouri Avenue in Atlantic City and/or Meadow Brook Station near Winchester Virginia". Some long-distance lines have to operate at reduced capacity. Some generating plants are told to reduce output. Others have to crank up to compensate.
Medium sized disturbances of this type happen a few times a year (more at the high point of the sunspot cycle). Only one warning so far this year, on June 29th. April 11, 2010 was the most recent disturbance event that required that action be taken. The warning came in from NOAA's Space Weather Center, and people in power grid control centers (the US has seven) reconfigured the power grid to prepare for it.
Understandably, the later half of the article talks about current solutions utilities and governments are considering to protect the infrastructure. However, let us just suppose for a moment that we are a type I civilization on the Kardashev scale. What type of conceptual solutions could be used to protect the whole planet instead of just small patches of people?
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
I lieved in Montreal during that blackout. The weather was fine that evening. I turned the power off on my computer (in case the power came on flaky) and went for a walk. A block or so away there was someone who had decided to sit on hos porch with a guitar. Several of us gathered around to listen.
Much later I went to bed. In the dark, natch.
It wasn't much of a problem for me, no.
But if it has been longer, and in midwinter, it would have been a problem.
Come to think of it, I've lived through such an event, too.
The ice storm of 1998. I missed the actual storm (I was in Oxford at the time), but I came home to the aftermath.The 9 centimetres of ice on everything had made power lines too heavy to support themselves, and the long-distance lines were out. I came home to a dark city. I called my wife from the airport on arrival (the phone system was still working -- there was still some power, but it had been directed to essential services, such as phones and hospitals.). The family had been forced out of the house by intense cold -- although we had an oil furnace, it turned out that the actual thermostat and burner used electricity to ignite the oil. Useless.
We were out of the house in an emergency shelter at a local hospital.
Now that was for a power outage of about ten days in the city. Electricity workers from the entire continent were flown in to repair the electrical systems. Some parts of Quebec were without power for about a month -- effectively evacuated into emergency shelters of various kinds.
I'm not sure the shelter system would have been sustainable for the six months expected from a serious solar storm. That one in 1989 was tiny compared with the one in 1859. Another one like the 1859 one could well occur this century. And we wouldn't be able to fly specialized emergency workers in from the whole continent. Every place will have its own problems to deal with.
Back in 1859 our technology was much less vulnerable. It's different now, and we should be trying to design such vulnerabilities out or our infrastructure as we continue to upgrade it in a relentless adoption of newer and newer technologies.
It's not just a nine-hour problem we may have to deal with.
-- hendrik
From SPACE!!! Alienado. I'm not just going to sit here and write about it. I'm going to throw bombs into space.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Is having a gun with sufficient ammo to protect yourself. After 1 week when panic really starts to hit and riots occur people will become like immoral wild beasts scavenging every bit of drinkable water, edible food and burnable fuel. Let's pray this never happens, ...
'Telegraphs in Philadelphia were spitting out âoefantastical and unreadable messages,â'
That's why, today, we have error correction.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
I was a kid back the ice storm and I have fond memories of those nine days without showers. We were locked inside the house forced to play monopoly and eats fondues bourguignonne every night.
(To put that in context, $2.6 trillion is about two years worth of federal borrowing. So in other words, don't sweat it. Congress won't bat an eye heaving it onto the debt.)
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Is this the same Lloyds of London that said in 2007 that for businesses "climate change would be the highest output cost for policies and collection?" Fast forward to today, where piracy is a higher issue along with 23 other items.
Om, nomnomnom...
Landlines are powered from the exchange. All exchanges have backup batteries and generators for just that situation - because in an emergency, you really want the phones to work so the injured can call 911.
It could become a serious concern with the loss of landlines in favor of cellphone and VoIP though. The infrastructure for those is much more distributed, and generally doesn't have much in the way of backup power. It's not practical to put a generator in every street cabinet and base station - those generators need regular inspections and maintenance.
Sounds like you had basic necessities, such as heat. Without that my place became unlivable.
And did you have a huge stock of nonspoiling food? Or did you have the miracle of an accessible functinoing groceryy store?
-- hendrik
... a CARRINGTON Event?
The article talked about everything except this? Is it something to do with Dynasty?
The highways are full of google-map guided computerized cars, the skies, at least around air-terminals, being already filled with radio and radar and computer-generated heads-up instrument displays dependent airplanes, then we will be ready for the earth to fly through a typhoonicane class geomagnetic storm. The best effects will be on human minds, which can't seem to stay on the rails even when they aren't being blown by geomagnetic squallings and electrical storms.
I arrived at the airport, which was powered with emergency power, and tried calling my wife on my cellphone. Apparently cell phones still worked at the airport, because I reached my wife, who turned out to be at an emergency shelter at the hospital, which also had some kind of emergency power (she's a doctor there).
The first I really knew about the ice storm was in the newsreels on the flight from Heathrow, where I say huge hydro towers falling over one after another like dominos.
-- hendrik
Before Y2K and after seeing War of the Worlds a few times I knew it was time to be ready for space dangers. Now I'm ready with lots of tin-foil covering the house attached to a grounding rod. A few hundred pounds of ramen noodles and a canary bird to warn if gas. Bring it on!
We are canceling the space weather apocalypse!
Switch on the GlaDOS!
The grocery store isn't the main problem (assuming it has enough food of the right type -- that is, not needing to be cooled -- on stock). You don't need any technology to exchange money for food, and hopefully the people working there haven't yet forgotten how to add numbers without having an electronic cash desk helping them (they also might have pocket calculators with working batteries, or even solar powered ones, to do that). Getting new food delivered will be a problem, but that will take a longer time to surface (assuming the grocery store applies good selling guidelines so that the supplies are not quickly bought off by hoarders).
Of course if you don't have that cash, you're doomed. Because your credit card won't work without electricity. Nor the ATMs. And since most probably your bank has no longer a paper record of your account and the computers are not working, even personally showing up at your bank won't help.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
A solar storm similar to the one in 1859 would wipe out every satellite in orbit, including GPS, weather, communications, internet, etc. That is considerably worse then just losing power for a few days or months. We have already had solar storms that have taken out several satellites permanently and damaged others, and these were relatively minor storms compared to the 1859 storm. It would probably disrupt the Van Allen Radiation belt with other more serious effects.
Having lived through various natural disasters that caused electrical power to be out for many days, I've found the situation to be workable if there is somewhere nearby that still has power. It can be very inconvenient, but if you can get somewhere nearby that has power it lets you solve most of the problems you run into. (The house I grew up in had a wood stove for backup heat in just that type of situation.)
An event that caused serious damage to any number of substation transformers would be a totally different story, if it mean that there was no electricity for even say, a 100 mile radius. This past winter I watched them replace a substation transformer near my house. It took them more than three months to do it - a failure impacting a number of those units would be a big problem.
So I work for a telco, and I used to work in the NOC. I got all the alarms for all the equipment all over the country and would call out techs to fix it or fix it myself when there was a problem. After a particularly bad day a few years back I read that there had been some elevated solar activity that day. We always knew that solar activity effected our equipment, after all our giant nationwide network was basically a huge copper net for all those stray electrons. But I realized that now I had a large dataset to play with.
To my surprise there was actually a NASA space weather website with large datasets you could download that would show solar output over time. So I dumped all this into a database along with logs of our alarms. Without getting into all the details of it, I found that we indeed did have spikes when solar activity went up but there were other spikes as well. Realizing our #1 cause of equipment alarm or failure was electrical storms, I then filtered out all alarms that were resolved as "Storm related" by the repair tech and re-ran my report. There, clear as day were 2 graph lines that were very similar in their trajectory. Solar activity and our alarm activity. It wasn't perfect but I'm no research scientist but it was compelling enough that I took this to my boss, very excited. He was impressed "That's really cool!" I was giddy... then he looked up and said "well?" and I was like "Huh" and which point he made the obvious point that I had missed in my excitement "there is absolutely nothing we can do about this. You just wasted several hours of your time... it's still really cool though!"
Ah well... but it is a fact, solar activity has a direct impact on copper networking equipment. Even our fiber optic networks had an increase in alarms, I suspect because the routers and such are metal and plugged into the electrical grid.
Carrington Event : ~ August 28, 1859 to ~Sept 2, 1869
Bastile Day Event : ~July 14, 2000 to ~July 16, 2000
Halloween Storms : ~October 19th, 2003 to ~Nov 7, 2003
Of course, when someone says they 'studied the Halloween Storm', they might've only studied 7 days instead of the full 3 weeks.
(disclaimer: I've been pushing for better data citation in the solar physics community for years ... this is one of my pet peeves)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I managed to get to a shelter. That made a huge difference. Getting to a place where there was heat was essential. I remember looking out of one of the shelter's windows, and seeing ice everywhere. Crystal trees. It was beautiful. But it was austere beauty, deadly to be stranded in.
When the electricity came back I managed to be one of the first to get the plumbers in, as well as nine kilowatts of electric heaters. They managed to get the regular heating on after disconnecting two busted radiators. But it took ages before the hose was warm. I came down with hypothermia. If I had known the symptoms, I would have gotten out of there earlier. In case you need to know, before you die, you start t feel warm again, even though you are still cold. I was actually fooled into taking my coat off. I did finish a fair amount of clean-up but when I got back to my sister-in-law's apartment (they got electricity before we did) I had trouble walking I was so cold. It took me all night to get warm again.