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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.'"
I do it every night, heat is off for summer and all electricity is off over night. I like to sleep for about 9 hours.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Wow, with that kind of forward thinking you could run for Congress, or be a pundit!
Hey - I have some land on Mount St Helens that I'd like to sell - want some?
I suppose you've also heard about plague, AIDS and the measles, but if you've never been affected by them, then it must be a lot of made up rubbish, right?
1) Smaller solar flares have affected the grid before. It's not unthinkable that a big one as mentioned in TFA can break a lot more stuff. Stuff that isn't exactly off the shelf in quantity. Might be a rare event, but if we can plan against it, maybe we should? Beats sitting in the dark for weeks.
2) Speaking of Y2K... the reason nothing happened is because companies took action. I've been involved in Y2K work at the time, and while a lot of it was bullshit ("Make sure the coffee machines are Y2K-ready or we're doooooomed"), the power plant and telco I worked for would have been severly affected by Y2K if nothing had been done. Some of that was simply being prepared for any disaster; their systems had never been offline completely (only parts of it), and there was no procedure for a cold restart.
In other words, when doom is called, consultants scramble to grab a piece of the hyped pie, companies take rational stock of their own situation and apply fixes as needed, and the general public scoffs as the event passes as another non-event, because of preparation and planning
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
9 hours no electricity? what a catastrophe. I've done that for 9, 18, 24 or so hours, it was called camping
Depends. If your oxygen concentrator doesn't run for 9 hours or you can't keep your insulin cold for 9 hours, yeah it could be a catastrophe. If you have lederly parents to care for or young children, yes it could be a problem. But if you are just thinking of no light bulbs or tv, yeah, then it probably isn't a big deal. OTOH, no subways, elevators, mass transit, gasoline heating or cooling (depending on the time of the year and your location), no emergency response or telephones to even contact them. Would that be a catastrophe? For some it could very well be.
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.
The reason Y2K turned out not to be a big deal is because millions of programmers worked round the clock to fix their code in time. I would expect that people on Slashdot, of all places, would understand that.
Unfortunately, we won't get sufficient advanced warning of a major solar storm.
It isn't uncommon to lose power for about a week with storms in this area. We loose power for about 9 hours probably once a year or so and for a week about once every 10 years. We all manage to survive. You can't stop the storms, so you deal with it. I don't see these solar storms as any worse and they are MUCH less frequent.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
In the worst case, it could leave 20 million to 40 million people in the Northeast without power — possibly for years — as utilities struggled to replace thousands of fried transformers stretching from Washington to Boston.
Nine hours was the relatively minor 1989 event. Something like the Carrington event could be much, much more damaging.
I'll leave it to your imagination how it might be to live and work in major urban areas with a severely damaged grid.
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.
Well, if you lived in Quebec or worked for any of the Canadian electric transmission providers your viewpoint might be a bit different...
sPh
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.
If your oxygen concentrator doesn't run for 9 hours
There are other reasons that solar flares that cause power outages. If one's life depends on concentrated oxygen one should have a backup supply to last a few days.
you can't keep your insulin cold for 9 hours
According to the FDA insulin will last quite a while without refrigeration.
Insulin products contained in vials or cartridges supplied by the manufacturers (opened or unopened) may be left unrefrigerated at a temperature between 59F and 86F for up to 28 days and continue to work. However, an insulin product that has been altered for the purpose of dilution or by removal from the manufacturer’s original vial should be discarded within two weeks.
There are many reasons power can be out for quite a while; weather, earthquake, equipment failure, etc. The point is that short term, less than a few days, without power should be able to be handled by individuals. If a catastrophe is going to happen if the power goes out for a few days there is a much bigger issue than space weather.
PS. I see this as another misuse of a word to sensationalize a story. Space weather may cause local problems but not catastrophes.
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"?
You sort of missed the point. A full-blown Carrington Event, like in 1859, could result in many months or perhaps a year without electricity. It's relatively easy to sit out a few hours or perhaps a week without power, but I think that you would find it a different story with out power for half a year or year (or tightly rationed power for that period of time). Like, perhaps you wouldn't have a job, and there would be signficant food shortages...
It isn't uncommon to lose power for about a week with storms in this area. We loose power for about 9 hours probably once a year or so and for a week about once every 10 years. We all manage to survive. You can't stop the storms, so you deal with it. I don't see these solar storms as any worse and they are MUCH less frequent.
You are talking about a small geographic area, they are talking planet wide and actually for an entire year.
I suspect the general public sees the hyped claims of various consultants a lot more than it sees the rational steps being taken. Why? because those "consultants" are trying to get free advertisments for their services by using the news. As long as the news facilitates this, the public either gets a distorted view, or has to go to the much more radical step of rejecting the basic trustworthyness of ALL news. Deciding the whole of mass media, entering your home for hours every day, is trying to con you, is a much bigger step than deciding a bunch of power companies, scientists, and odd little government agencies you seldom think about (i.e. the National Institute of Standards) are doing it.
Who is John Cabal?
Meh, US society would be a hell of a lot better off if we did absolutely nothing to mitigate terrorist attacks than as things stand now. Sadly, "give me liberty or give me death" has largely been replaced by "keep me safe at all costs" in popular sentiment.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
Nine hours was the relatively minor 1989 event. Something like the Carrington event could be much, much more damaging.
Nine hours Is about the maximum duration and the Carrington event wasn't much longer than that. Once your part of the world rotates into the dark you are shielded from most of the the CME effects. (Not all, but the most damaging high energy flow is diverted around the earth).
Further CMEs don't tend to last more than a couple days at worst. And they take 3 to 4 days to arrive, so people have time to unplug stuff, and even to de-energize and temporarily ground long transmission lines. Your local power company already knows where every manual disconnect switch is, and can have the local grid broken into small segments and de-energized in mere hours. Some of these are in cabinets in your neighborhood, and some are on power poles (long rod running to a locked lever arm near the ground).
Long un-grounded transmission lines (or similar structures, even electric fences) are the most easily effected. But anything that is grounded periodically (every few miles) is not particularly affected. Nobody thought of this in the era of telegraph, but its built into every system these days with the possible exception of highpower transmission lines.
Modern building wiring, with GFI and GFCI would probably all trip, preventing a lot of infrastructure damage, and if not, you've got 4 days to plan manual breaker tripping.
These surges won't affect big pump motors as the story suggests, because 1) you know they are coming ahead of time, 2) its easy to disconnect the pump motors from the mains, and start your local diesel generators for the duration. The disconnect switch gear and the local generators are already built into critical infrastructure. Short runs between the backup generators and the pumps would not build up any induced currents.
The story is a great deal of hyperventilating by people who don't really understand how infrastructure is built these days.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
If you cannot survive without electricity for 9 hours, you have to expect to die.
Hell 3 days would be my absolute minimum, with multiple backup plans planned.
Sure, there are broader cases, and legitimate reasons.
I think here in Canada, they strictly recommend that you are capable of surviving one or two days if you go out driving in winter. Because there is a chance that you and hundreds of others will be stuck in a blizzard and trapped without outside help for at least that long.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Wow, with that kind of forward thinking you could run for Congress, or be a pundit!
Hey - I have some land on Mount St Helens that I'd like to sell - want some?
Yeah, I'll take that land. Its probably safe for another 30 thousand years.
Look, you are being unfair.
CMEs do not affect earth suddenly without warning. You get 3 to four days before the effect reaches earth.
That is plenty of time to announce and plan for 1 one day power grid shutdown. You trip every breaker in the local grid, and you can protect the local transformers as well as the residential electronics. (Most grids can do this remotely.) You need several miles (10 or 50) before the effect of the CME will induce dangerous current. Every power cord isn't going to suddenly become a lethal chunk of wire.
There is not a boogie man under your bed.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Deciding the whole of mass media, entering your home for hours every day, is trying to con you, is a much bigger step than deciding a bunch of power companies, scientists, and odd little government agencies you seldom think about (i.e. the National Institute of Standards) are doing it.
Depends on which media and scientists we're speaking of. For example, CNBC apparently spent a lot of time selling the Facebook IPO, including all day coverage on the day Facebook hit the stock market. Fox News is notorious for its bias. CNN just airs "live coverage" rather than actual news these days. And just about everyone notices that when news coverage from most sources actually brushes on knowledge that you know, they tend to get it very wrong - often in ways that are convenient for them. Con artists do that.
On the other side, you have "climate change" and the various shenanigans surrounding that. Such as James Hansen's 1998 testimony where they cut the A/C so they could get a great photo op.
Or "climategate", the leakage of emails from University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, which didn't have much in the way of actual crime (aside from Russian tax evasion and deliberately disobeying the UK Freedom of Information Act). But it did have remarkably bad code for vital tasks, chest thumping climatologists vowing (perhaps seriously perhaps not) to block publication of heretical research (and its subsequent insertion in IPCC records), and discussing concerns with research only in private (eg, the infamous "hide the decline" remark about not including tree ring data after 1960 in climate reconstructions).
In other words, a mask for public consumption which hides a somewhat more biased and human side. Con artists do that too.
A full-blown Carrington Event, like in 1859, could result in many months or perhaps a year without electricity.
Or it might be just a couple of days till the event is over. It apparently is not that hard to protect this sort of equipment against the sort of surges that a Carrington Event would generate.
Gasoline heating or cooling via electricity? Where is this common practice?
Most gasoline is stored below ground at stations for the purposes of preventing vapor volume loss. I'm not aware whether transport trucks employ cooling systems, but I doubt it's terribly necessary due to the volume of liquid we're dealing with.
Now, diesel heating is another matter. But even diesel is stored below ground, and the heating is usually done by inline vehicle systems.
I'd be interested in knowing more about this if you have any more info. I'm not finding much through a google search.
As far as the effects of what is basically a global EMP, we'd basically be dealing with a complete failure of modern infrastructure. Even old point-based automotive systems (no modern electronics) would likely have issues if it's bad enough - they still rely upon electricity. Older diesels could be push or crank started, but that'd require some messing.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
A full-blown Carrington Event, like in 1859, could result in many months or perhaps a year without electricity.
Or it might be just a couple of days till the event is over. It apparently is not that hard to protect this sort of equipment against the sort of surges that a Carrington Event would generate.
Only if you do it. And it will only be done if those responsible for it are aware of the danger.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
It's a long article, I can understand why you might not have gone through it. Here's some snipsthat might be important to note and that caught my attention when I was reading up on it previously.
So yeah, Lloyd's of London and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission disagree with you for good reasons.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
9 hours no electricity?
. . . means 9 hours of no light pollution. Awesome, for watching the amazing aurora borealis! No TV? No Internet? Get outside, and look at a sky that you will never see again!
Of course, let's hope that hospitals and such are prepared . . .
... for the triffid uprising after everyone goes blind!
Not if they no longer have the means which provide the warnings, due to cost-cutting.
Great logic. "You've warned us and thus now we are aware. Since we are aware, you should not have warned us."
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
From Wikipedia (emphasis by me):
From August 28, 1859, until September 2, numerous sunspots and solar flares were observed on the sun. Just before noon on September 1, the British astronomer Richard Carrington observed the largest flare,[3] which caused a major coronal mass ejection (CME) to travel directly toward Earth, taking 17.6 hours. Such a journey normally takes three to four days.
So much for three or four days of warning.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
In 1859 we didn't have sun watching satellites.
Further the the first solar flare was August 28, and the big one was first noticed on September 1st.
So there were in excess of 3 days warning.
The first flare also caused enough disruption that telegraph didn't work, so in the modern era we would have been preparing for that one, long before the second one started.
But, hey, nice selective quote.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Even if the machine shop is getting electricity. This isn't detailed in TFA but is well documented elsewhere. Take this article where they explain:
A further example to make it more obvious that khallow doesn't actually understand what the problem is.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
basically a global EMP
I was starting to think I was on the wrong website, I had to read down this far before someone finally understands the threat is more than a just a mess of power line knocked down in a storm. Sure humans were built to survive without electricity, but not in the vast numbers created by our invention of civilization. The numbers supported by a civilization are directly related to its technology level. Without electricity we will be metaphorically back in the 1920's with 7X the number of people on our little rock requiring food and shelter.
If the damage takes too long to fix civil war and mass migration is a likely outcome, which will be hard to believe for people who think that drought has nothing to do with the Syrian war.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Since you just practiced during the small one, and having history as your guide, 17 hours is plenty of time.
Like I said, there was easily 3 days of warning.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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.
Will you still accept bitcoins? Paper bitcoins, maybe? :)
Whether you "buy" it or not is irrelevant to the veracity of the notion.
*A* replacement part. Singular. Scale that. Where a power station has to replace over half of its components, not just one or two. Further, practically every major power station in the entire world would be affected by the event... and these machine shops generally would each service more than one power station, since it is not normally the case that multiple stations need replacement at the same time, and the cost of keeping spares around for parts that fail so infrequently is prohibitive.
Plus, of course, most of the machine shops worldwide would themselves generally not have any power either... so they aren't likely to get the first components out in just a week, like you project. Yeah, a year is perhaps a very realistic estimate on when most people could expect their power to return at reliable levels.... for some people I'd think it could be as long as two.
For some people, especially in very urban areas, it may be as little as just a few weeks to a couple of months, but I don't think for a moment that a year is an exaggeration. If anything, it's certain to be an underestimate for some.
Nothing of the scale of the event in 1859.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'