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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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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