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How a Solar Storm Two Years Ago Nearly Caused a Catastrophe On Earth
schwit1 writes: On July 23, 2012, the sun unleashed two massive clouds of plasma that barely missed a catastrophic encounter with the Earth's atmosphere. These plasma clouds, known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs), comprised a solar storm thought to be the most powerful in at least 150 years.
"If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces," physicist Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado tells NASA. Fortunately, the blast site of the CMEs was not directed at Earth. Had this event occurred a week earlier when the point of eruption was Earth-facing, a potentially disastrous outcome would have unfolded.
"Analysts believe that a direct hit could cause widespread power blackouts, disabling everything that plugs into a wall socket. Most people wouldn't even be able to flush their toilet because urban water supplies largely rely on electric pumps. ... According to a study by the National Academy of Sciences, the total economic impact could exceed $2 trillion, or 20 times greater than the costs of a Hurricane Katrina. Multi-ton transformers damaged by such a storm might take years to repair." Steve Tracton put it this way in his frightening overview of the risks of a severe solar storm: "The consequences could be devastating for commerce, transportation, agriculture and food stocks, fuel and water supplies, human health and medical facilities, national security, and daily life in general."
"Analysts believe that a direct hit could cause widespread power blackouts, disabling everything that plugs into a wall socket. Most people wouldn't even be able to flush their toilet because urban water supplies largely rely on electric pumps. ... According to a study by the National Academy of Sciences, the total economic impact could exceed $2 trillion, or 20 times greater than the costs of a Hurricane Katrina. Multi-ton transformers damaged by such a storm might take years to repair." Steve Tracton put it this way in his frightening overview of the risks of a severe solar storm: "The consequences could be devastating for commerce, transportation, agriculture and food stocks, fuel and water supplies, human health and medical facilities, national security, and daily life in general."
" disabling everything that plugs into a wall socket. Most people wouldn't even be able to flush their toilet because urban water supplies largely rely on electric pumps"
Every single water filtration plant has very large diesel generators that can run the place for months without electrical power. And no, a solar flare can not burn out giant motors and generators, all that can be ran easily without the SCADA system. In fact we used to run drills operating the place by hand, as most of the guys that did it from 1940 until 1990 did it mostly by hand.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You define productivity in a weird way if you think that walking into all the factories and breaking all the equipment makes all the people there more productive.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
And yet nothing changes, there is no hardening of infrastructure, no preparation or planning.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Which is why I don't understand how you could go on to making your 3rd comment after your 2nd comment calls it a fallacy.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
The sun is clearly a terrorist. I also hear it harbors vast quantities of cheap energy sources. time to INVADE!!! CHARGE!!!
In the 80s, Quebec's power grid got taken out by solar storms. It was particularly susceptible because we have a ton of really long-distance runs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
That one was just bad enough to flip circuit breakers on the grid, but it still caused a 9 hour power outage. Some satellites also lost control.
Until you realize that the production facilities for that equipment was also damaged, and the facilities which made those machines, etc. There aren't a lot of steam engine driven factories producing electrical products.
Problem is, the world would pretty much need to bootstrap itself out of the mechanical age again.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
The sad part is that it wasn't even a fallacy in the first paragraph. The ISPs aren't going to do dick with all that money unless forced by an act of either congress or god, so there's no opportunity cost.
Every time I see one of these new doomsday scenarios pop up, I know there is a media-savvy researcher somewhere looking to score a big grant.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Desensitization. Plausible explanation for when they turn everything off on purpose.
Really? This would be devastating? We can't live without electricity, electronics, water pumps? It's amazing we're here today!
Yes, it very likely would. All those urban areas that grew as big and relatively healthy as they did, thanks to clean water and efficient sewage systems? If that wasn't brought back online, fast, they'd start moving toward their pre-sanitation population levels. The hard way.
Same would apply for agricultural areas and yields that depend on powered irrigation. Unless that was brought back online, and quickly enough to avoid damage to the crop, you'd see yields plummet toward historical levels, with population following suit shortly thereafter. Very unpleasant.
Hopefully there would be enough enough backup systems to restore function relatively quickly; but if not things would be unlikely to go well.
Maybe, maybe not. We know that companies, such as electrical suppliers, have extra equipment lying around for general maintenance and upgrade. Also, the people who manufacture these products have supplies on hand.
While it would be tedious, you would use this spare equipment to repair the most critical connections (from power plant to factories), thus enabling you to begin resupplying everyone else.
I'm not trying to minimize the nightmare scenario of getting things back up and running, only pointing out the path to get us there.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
That was only in North Carolina.
The problem is, we as a civilization are no longer set up to live without those things. Before air conditioning, windows in office buildings could be opened and there were fans everywhere. The fans are gone and the windows don't open now. People live in apartments way too far up to be practical if you have to take the stairs. Nearly nobody has a well and bucket anymore, so yes, we depend on water pumps. In theory, we could, given time, adapt to do without (+/- having centers of population too dense for that) but 24 hours really isn't enough notice.
Really? This would be devastating? We can't live without electricity, electronics, water pumps? It's amazing we're here today!
Yes, it very likely would. All those urban areas that grew as big and relatively healthy as they did, thanks to clean water and efficient sewage systems? If that wasn't brought back online, fast, they'd start moving toward their pre-sanitation population levels. The hard way.
Same would apply for agricultural areas and yields that depend on powered irrigation. Unless that was brought back online, and quickly enough to avoid damage to the crop, you'd see yields plummet toward historical levels, with population following suit shortly thereafter. Very unpleasant.
Hopefully there would be enough enough backup systems to restore function relatively quickly; but if not things would be unlikely to go well.
Generator-powered factories producing generators would suddenly be very very valuable.
The real question we should be asking is; why doesn't NASA have the authority to order a nationwide grid shutdown in the event that one of their several satellites dedicated strictly to predicting and identifying solar disruptions actually works and warns us before it happens? We have spent billions on this already, why not put that to use instead of fear mongering about how long it would take to manufacture a bunch of high voltage transformers?
They did, so now they are going to sue the sun.
> "According to a study by the National Academy of Sciences, the total economic impact could exceed $2 trillion,"
Holy Jesus! That's a little bit more than half of what we borrowed those two years!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
the problem is not in the solar storms, as they have been happening for billions of years, and will happen for another billions after our "civili"zation is long gone. Note that on the statistical based our observational material for the power of these storms is absolutely insignificant. The problem is our technology, or more the way it has evolved since the beginning of 20th century. Tesla had gone in totally opposite direction, looking and evolving natural way of power distribution and efficient power usage and protection and was solely designing and working with HV systems. Every appliance can be designed to work with HV and high frequency, the natural way of energy distribution, but this was not how the rest of the engineering world looked at the problem, so they and the industry when in totally the other way. Under a such storm virtually all of the Tesla's inventions will just give more power for they were naturally designed to transform such power surges. So the educated reader can go and research, and at least try to build some of these appliances, and educate other people around him/her. The more they know about Tesla and his systems the more humans have chance to face/change the problems that procrastinate our contemporary "civili"zation and as a bonus not to worry about cosmic event of a such type.
Yes, for 6 months the world would have been thrown into chaos. Millions might have even died. But we would have emerged from it stronger and more united as a planet. Imagine just in the USA.
Would Ted Cruz have shut down the government to protest Obamacare after having lived through an event like that? Do you think the Republicans would be global warming deniers if they had gone through an event where the sun struck back at earth and nearly destroyed us?
Suddenly american politics wouldn't be about immigration and shouts of "benghazi" it would be about trying to put the pieces back together and rebuilding our infrastructure rather than spending trillions on a fighter plane that can't fly.
I wish the disaster had happened, because it would focus us on the things that are important, rather than stupid wedge issues meant to keep the serfs arguing with each other rather than realizing their masters are incompetent.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Actually, we know how to make hardened electronics, and we do make them.
But it does NOT come cheap, you have to add a number of protection (clamp) diodes to *EVERY SINGLE GATE* inside integrated circuits, for example. You've read that right: on a modern microprocessor, that's close to a billion extra diodes at the very least. These not only take up die space, they also cause other nasty issues re. signal integrity and low-voltage operation, especially at very high frequencies. Any interconects have to be sized to be able to deal with currents induced by a high dV/ds and high dV/dt (voltage variation in space or time), including those inside the chip. And you need an extra-tick discharge ground plane, which causes capacitancy problems (i.e. signal degradation on high-frequency operation).
And lots of protection circtuitry everywhere else, plus very effective ground shielding, and overvoltage peak clampers everywhere you have more than a few centimeters of any sort of conductor. It adds a lot of bulk, and it is expensive.
It is also standard fare for EMP-hardened military-grade portable devices that cannot be shielded behind several inches of stupidly well-grounded steel/copper faraday cages all the time, so it can be done. But "portable" in military speak can easily weight 30kg :-p
"Most people wouldn't even be able to flush their toilet because urban water supplies largely rely on electric pumps. "
Um, no.
First, the normal flush pressure comes from the water tank on the back...so EVERYONE would be able to flush at least once. (Actually, in a disaster, that tank isn't a bad source of freshwater, at least for a while.)
Most communities have water tanks above their population, either on a nearby height, or in water towers. This makes the system - at least in the short term, until that tank is drained - impervious to power outage. Even NYC has tens of thousands of rooftop tanks with the same function, but on a per-building level.
GRAVITY, not electricity, produces water pressure that refills that local toilet tank. So until the community tank is emptied, and electric pumps are required to fill that large tank, everyone would be able to flush just fine.
http://www.howstuffworks.com/w...
-Styopa
These scenarios are always full of maybe, possibility, chance, etc. without much actual risk analysis. Severe cold snaps regularly plunge large areas into darkness for days. People switch to candles and gas heaters instead of suddenly reverting to the middle ages. Most infrastructure generally fails quite regularly from poor design or maintenance, without any extra-terrestrial assistance.
I guess 'Solar wind may inconvenience a lot of people' doesn't sell as well as 'We're all doomed, head for the hills'
reading all this stuff of potential disasters... is it numbing our sense of urgency? There was a time when we had no idea of many dynamics of the Sun (there were no spacecraft). It is scientifically interesting, an IRIS scientists said the solar system is a system, the sun is not constant and causes non-constant interactions to planets. Speaking of disasters that have happened, might happen, a nearby star can go supernova. Or there could be a nearby gamma ray burst. But looming catastrophe is shrinking reserves of water that is safe to drink.
mfwright@batnet.com
I suppose you don't age then? You will keep working until the day you die?
Don't get caught unaware by the next major CME. Read the space weather forecast from NOAA.
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
Let's leave the "well and bucket" approach in the past please. I don't think having your water supply in an open-air hole is the most sanitary way to do it. All you really need is to push a point down into the water table and attach a hand pump. Just don't forget to always keep an extra jug of water on hand in case you need it to prime the pump.
To be blunt, politicians. Everyone who agreed with the establishment and supported the ongoing maintenance of a solar storm readiness plan would get to be the bozo whose big scheme sat there wasting money, and only once in a while would any of them get to play hero.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Why don't we harden the electrical grid for this? What technologies could be used to protect electrical systems from this? Maybe this would involve a system to suppress the surge but also a system of disconnect switches that could be remotely activated to disconnect the electrical grid? What sorts of systems could be installed to prevent such a catastrophe? Could we install disconnect switches around transformers and such? What about unplugging your household appliances and electronics? Would that protect them from being hit? Its astonishing considering this is the greatest threat we havent taken more effort to install protective systems.
You hit on a hot topic for me. I live in San Diego, which has beautiful weather almost all the time, and yet nearly every building, restaurant, office etc. is sealed up tight with the AC on blast. Such a waste. C'mon architects and city planners of the future, we can do better!
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
Bunch of astrophysicists walk into a bar. First one orders a gin and tonic, and gets it. Second one orders a red wine, and gets it. Third one orders a Mexican beer, at which point the bartender yells "all right, that's it, everybody out!" Another bar customer asks the first astrophysicist "what's going on?" He responds "Coronal mass ejection."
I expect Morgan Freeman, Tom Hanks, Uma Thurman, and Cameron Diaz (with cameos by Dolly Parton and Emma Watson) to make a movie about this immediately. "The Corona"
Ah, bet you're thinking - what an asshat, right?!
No, see - the thing about such natural disasters is that they tend to bring out the best in us, sometimes we need a crisis like that when we're too spoiled and too set in our ways to help fellow man (or nature) out, history shows that these disasters often bring out the better in us and replenish life and give jobs and hopes to those who have none.
It will also serve as a reminder that will be remembered for decades - how vulnerable we are, and that we should prepare and stop taking everyday life for granted.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Most people wouldn't even be able to flush their toilet because urban water supplies largely rely on electric pumps
Correction: they'd be able to flush once. Make it count!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Because NASA isn't in charge of the energy sector? They monitor and advise. DOE via FERC is in charge of the electrical sector. The ES-ISAC, run by the FERC-appointed ERO, NERC, and the regional Reliability Coordinators (PeakRC in the western US, formerly the WECC RC).
More to the point, there are NERC standards being developed which deal with geomagnetic disturbances. A TPL and EOP standard: http://www.nerc.com/pa/Stand/P...
The bigger issue is cost. We can prepare for anything, but at what cost? Are you ready for your electricity rates to double to cover a 12% chance in the next 10 years? It's a tough balanacing act.
Why would rates double as a result of putting into place a plan (and probably a few layers of communications systems on top of already existing infrastructure) to mitigate the problem before it starts? Oh right, because we would have to pay for a team at NASA, a team at FERC, a team at each of the regional ISO, etc. to all do the same thing? Ugh. Put NASA in charge, they got us to the moon damnit. If rocket scientists cant fix it, no one can.
There is plenty of misinformation, exaggeration and also ignorance about the potential threat of CMEs and other solar events. Many have justly referred to the Carrington but because it occurred during a time in human civilization when we were not at all "dependent" on electrical infrastructure and computers it is hard to infer the current danger of such a thing. It is sobering to note that although it is hard to predict what would happen in our time if such an event were to occur, it is an obviously safe conclusion to make that such an event might occur again.
Really? This would be devastating? We can't live without electricity, electronics, water pumps?
Can you farm without electricity? Gasoline? Do you have all the pre-electricity farm equipment that would allow you to grow food without a tractor, power tools, etc? Does your well pump even work without electricity? I'll bet it doesn't. I'll bet you can't really live off the grid unless you're Amish or Mennonite. You simply don't have the pre-industrial technology to get along in such a world.
Many in cities and suburbs, after 3 or 4 weeks, would wind up going out into the country to forage if they could find gasoline to pump (and gas pumps work with electricity!), because the supermarkets would be empty and all the food in the refrigerators/freezers would have spoiled after only a few days.
To your "off the grid" house. Probably.
inb4 "I have an arsenal of arms to keep them away"
Your best defense and survival depends on your neighbors. Because one lone person with a stash of food and arms can be out-sieged by the outside world.
I would suggest watching "The Trigger Effect," Episode 1 of James Burke's "Connections" series. Anyone (sensible) who watches that and looks around at the technology that supports all of us will come away with the conclusion that if it seriously went away for a month, we'd be fucked. The shit would so seriously hit the fan that your incredulousness indicates you are either completely out of touch with society at large, deliberately myopic, or some teenager that hasn't lived life enough to have any kind of broad view. Good luck with that.
--
BMO
I get the impression you're not talking about cars, batteries and charging stations...
Language students: Don't try to learn English here. This ain't it.
The sun's rotational period is about 25 days, meaning if it missed pointing at us by a week, then is was shooting into the solar system at a 100 degree angle from us. That doesn't sound to me like a "barely".
Somebody please mod parent "Insightful". TFA is a bunch of FUD.
Google says:
Therefore the probability of being hit by a given CME is (2.8 x 10^17) / (5.1 x 10^8) = 5.5 x 10^-8, or a 0.0000055% chance.
Now the number of CMEs per year is actually higher than I expected, which I suppose explains why we do in fact get hit between 0 - 70 times per year. However the number of annual large CMEs is quite low, with none of the sites I visited actually agreeing on the number (most seemed to agree it's less than 5 per year in a solar maximum.) Let's say there are 5 per year. That only brings the chance of being hit by one of them up to 0.000028% per year. So if I live to be 100, the chances I'll see one in my lifetime are only 0.0028%.
caveat: These calculations ignore CME cross-section (essentially width and height) and duration (essentially length), since I couldn't find any accurate information on those. If you find those, you can factor them into these calculations by multiplying by the cross-section, multiplying by the % duration that the CME's strength is high, and multipyling by the Earth's average orbital velocity. That will modify the probility to take into account the volume of space the Earth occupies while the CME is traversing the edge of our 1 AU sphere, and how much of the surface of the sphere is touched by the CME.
A recursive sig
Can impart wisdom and truth
Call proc signature()
Old fellow Tesla is bound by the same laws of physics like the rest of the mortal world ... ...
Dream on
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
And in what kind of society, environment, state ... how ever you want to call it, would he get such a 'grant'?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Can't you just find a fresh water stream and drink that? Hell there are like 10 just in my area, not including fresh water lakes that are technically drinkable within 15km.
A CME event is not a 'one second' thing but an hours or days long one. ... ... fresh food in the next best supermarket, too!
We got hit 3 times in the previous 200 years, means roughly every 65 years
The problem is not the hit, but the effect to our way of living.
If your fridge goes off, your food starts rotting
If you have no fresh water even using flour which is durable for centuries if airtight stored wont give you a bread or a pancake save or at least pleasant to eat.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Barely missed? So you're saying it didn't miss?
The windows don't open now.
The hell they don't. The problem is, when I'm done opening it, it can't close. Bwahahaha. *goes to look for hammer*
The problem is not the law of physics, it is the technology implementation. Try using any of your electronic devices to a HV rapidly pulsating (2-3K cycles will suffice) in air (basic dielectric(, electrostatic field and you will get the idea. And lets not go to the "laws" of physics for Nature does not recognize our human defined laws about it, for ALL of them (our laws) brake, under more or less extremes conditions. And a point here it is good to go back in the pioneers of the electrical physics and engineering (Maxwell, Heaviside, Tesla, Lord Kelvin, Steinmetz, C. A. Bjerknes and several others fellows) in order to understand the present inefficiencies.
Or there could be a nearby gamma ray burst.
There isn't much point in worrying about this. About the only people that would be spared on the side of the earth that was exposed would be people that were already underground/under water at the time. How far underground/under water would depend on the intensity of the gamma rays. Even if we detected a burst of neutrinos to alert us that something was coming, it wouldn't be enough warning for anyone to take shelter that wasn't already there. I guess if you really wanted to be safe you could live a few hundred feet down in an old mine, but that would rather suck.
The concept that "the population would correct itself" is a pretty fucking bad euphemism for widespread famine.
You don't know anything about modern agriculture that feeds 7+ billion people.
Crikes, you're dumb.
--
BMO
And here's the teenager with no life experience whatsoever.
Do you have any idea how long it takes to rebuild just a power substation? Do you have any idea how few EEs, techs, riggers, and laborers we have to rebuild them en masse?
You don't. That much is plain.
backup generators
What fucking backup generators? They don't exist.
Call up National Grid. Ask them how many "backup generators" they have for a Carrington Event situation. The laughter should be loud.
--
BMO
And why is that not taught in school? Any idea?
Sigh ... we use high frequencies quite a lot ... ever figured how a classic TV works?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Rural and many suburban people would be OK as long as they boil the water somehow, but what about people in NYC? Surely you don't think they can drink from the Hudson?!?
Fans? AC? No there's a far more fundamental problem.
I read an opinion piece once that postulated that if electricity suddenly stopped for extended periods we wouldn't me uncomfortable, we'd likely be dead. Before electricity the human race was somewhat disperse. Towns were littered everywhere and major towns had limited populations. As we the human species have congregated in major cities, and those cities have grown, our dependence on electricity is now total.
Water pumps? that kind of thing is supplied by backups. I would not worry about our water system in an extended nation wide blackout.
What I would worry is the ability to move. A city can grind to a halt when an intersection is out, imagine if they are all out.
What I would worry about is the ability to eat. Refrigeration is a cornerstone of our supply chain. Supermarkets couldn't function without electricity to run refrigeration, and without this food storage systems we wouldn't be able to feed the large population that has congregated away from the primary industry which feeds it. Hell I think back to the flood which occurred in my city in 2011. The local supermarkets actually ran out of bread, milk and water. The flood lasted 2 days and didn't actually cut off all of our highways. We couldn't make it 2 bloody days without panic buying, and stocking out food supplies in the city.
On that note, what I would worry about is other people. Looting, rioting and basic survival instincts. People have the intellectual capability of a turnip during a crisis situation. In the same 2011 flood I saw some lady lose it in a supermaket after buying the last 15 loaves of bread. She was told she could only have 2 loaves so she decided to throw the lot on the ground and trample it screaming "If I can't have it then nobody can!" To reiterate this was a 2 day flood. Where she intended to store 15 loaves of bread in a city with 30 degree average temperature and an 85% average humidity without it going mouldy I have no idea. Likewise the fact we stocked out of bottled water was alarming given there was nothing wrong with our taps or water supply.
The problem is not that we can't live without electricity, but rather we'll likely kill each other without electricity.
/. has sunk so far
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.