Earth Barely Dodged Solar Blast In 2012

Rambo Tribble (1273454) writes "Coronal mass ejections, with severity comparable to the 1859 Carrington event, missed Earth by only 9 days in 2012, according to researchers. The Carrington event caused widespread damage to the telegraph system in the U.S., and a similar occurrence would be devastating to modern electronics, it is thought. From the Reuters article, 'Had it hit Earth, it probably would have been like the big one in 1859, but the effect today, with our modern technologies, would have been tremendous.' The potential global cost for such damage is pegged at $2.6 trillion."

Comments

Dodged?

[wonkey_monkey]

Yeah, I know, I'm being a bit picky here, but... dodged?

The CME barely missed; Earth didn't do anything, the lazy git.

Re:ZOMG a bad thing didn't happen!

[fnj]

Crank away on that points-equipped car -- the ignition coil will be fried, and so will the copper windings in the starter and altern/generator.

There were no solid-state chips then, and, still, unconnected telegraph receivers were tapping away receiving imaginary messages from the ZOMG to earth.

Think. I know it's hard, but try it. We're not talking about magic here. The car does not have an antenna hundreds of km to over a thousand km long. Electric fields are measured in volts per meter, not volts per fairy tale.

Inducing a 20 mA current in a telegraph line hundreds of km long (which is all it takes to "tap away") is slightly different from inducing tens to hundreds of thousands of amps for tens of seconds to minutes. That's what it would take to "fry" the windings in a starter or alternator. And the antenna length of the wiring attached to the starter or alternator is no more than a couple of meters, INSIDE a faraday cage.

An ignition coil would take less current to burn out than a starter or alternator, but still a whole hell of a lot more current than it would ever see inside the faraday cage of the car body.

Re:ZOMG a bad thing didn't happen!

[cusco]

The problem is not so much end-user equipment, although that alone would be pretty devastating to most people. The real problem is the destruction of the electrical grid that would result. Most of the large transformers and relays are custom-made one-off pieces, and backorder time for them under normal circumstances is 3 months to 2 years. There are no procedures available to collapse the grid in preparation to a CME to protect that equipment, it's really not doable at this point. Imagine most of North America without electricity for a series of months. Electricity is used to pump natural gas around the country, so most of that's unavailable. Electricity is used in gas pumps, so even if your car still works you have no fuel for it. Farmers have the fuel in their tanks, but after that their tractors are going to be parked for the duration. Many railroad switches can no longer be thrown by hand and schedules are all computerized, so big chunks of the rail network are going to be down. Most hospitals have 3 days of fuel for their generators, beyond that they're back to doing surgery by candlelight.

The repercussions are enormous.