geomancer
04-12-2012, 07:13 PM
https://www.cosmosmagazine.com/blog/5498/the-coming-storm
The coming storm
Thursday, 12 April 2012
https://www.cosmosmagazine.com/files/imagecache/blog/files/features/print/20120412_superflare.jpg
Powerful X-class flares create radiation storms that produce auroras.
Credit: NASA
~ Wilson da Silva
IT’S NOW CLEAR that the solar storm of 1859 was the most powerful in recorded history, and the largest known solar flare.
When next one erupts – as scientists are now certain one will – the flare will wreak global chaos and likely bring our modern interconnected civilisation to a standstill.
Power surges up and down electrical grids could knock out thousands of transformers, shutting down power to many of the world’s biggest cities for weeks or months – transformers are not easily replaced. Mobile networks would go down, refrigeration fail, banks and stockmarkets would be forced to close and aircraft would lose access to navigation and GPS.
Why have we not been aware of this danger before? In a sense, we have: there have been a number of powerful solar flares in the past century, and they have knocked out power grids, scrambled communications and disrupted satellites. What’s changed is that scientists had thought that such events, although punishing, had localised effects. And they thought we’d already seen the worst.
Not so. Only recently, through clever detective work, have scientists realised just how powerful the massive superflare of 1859 was. But because it was the first documented sighting of a solar flare, and because our world was then largely devoid of electrical grids and electronic devices, the cascade of effects that followed were not understood or linked together. Telegraph operators reported sparks leaping off their equipment, melting wiring and starting fires; while auroras – usually confined near the poles – danced above the skies of Cuba and Hawaii, and as far north as Santiago, Chile.
ONLY OVER THE PAST decade, as scientists sought to understand the Sun’s more recent history, have scientists pieced together the 1859 Carrington Event, named after Richard C. Carrington, a British astronomer who just happened to be studying sunspots on 1 September 1859 when, at 11:18 am Greenwich Mean Time, the flare erupted. Such a severe solar storm today could leave cities dark for months.
“This is not a matter of if, it's simply a matter of when, and how big," said Jane Lubchenco, a celebrated U.S. marine ecologist and U.S. Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere who heads the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “We have every reason to expect we're going to be seeing more space weather in the coming years, and it behooves us to be smart and be prepared,” she added, speaking at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in February 2011.
After an unusually quiet period, the Sun is now again ramping up toward a new solar maximum, predicted to peak around 2013. A solar maximum is when the Sun’s stormy activity rises, triggering bigger flares and sunspot outbreaks – part of a roughly 11-year cycle. Interestingly, a similar quiet period preceded the 1859 event.
On Valentine’s Day 2011, a huge solar flare unleashed a wave of charged particles toward Earth, followed by coronal mass ejections, or blobs of plasma, that took days to arrive. When they did, they interacted with Earth's magnetic field to cause geomagnetic storms that wiped out radio communications in the western Pacific and parts of Asia, and caused airlines to reroute polar flights to avoid radio outages.
During the last solar maximum, the modern world wasn't as dependent on satellites, mobile phones and GPS as it is now. Bank transactions now use GPS signals as highly accurate clocks for time-stamping transactions: knock out GPS and the banking system and stock markets go with it.
It may not sound like it, but this is good news: it’s a disaster we can avoid. We can’t stop the Sun from flaring – nothing can halt a fusion reactor pouring out 386 billion billion megawatts of energy. But we can shut down our electrical grids and disconnect electronic devices before the pulse arrives – and allow the geomagnetic storm to pass, before turning it back on.
Sounds simple right? But to do so, we need to know just when such a superflare is coming. And that’s the problem: all that sits between us and a superflare is the Advance Composition Explorer (ACE) satellite, orbiting about 1.5 million km from Earth and 148.5 million km from the Sun, at the L1 Lagrange point where the gravitational field of the two bodies cancel each other out. ACE has a prime view of the solar wind and high-energy particles spewed out by the Sun toward Earth, and can give advance warning of 15 to 45 minutes for severe geomagnetic storms. But it was launched in August 1997 and is, as the U.S. National Academy of Sciences warned in 2009, “well beyond its planned operational life”. There is no backup. And we’ve just gone into another solar maximum. This is a clear case for another satellite to be sent up, or for even a string of them – before calamity strikes.
As former U.S. president John F. Kennedy once said, “The time to repair the roof is when the Sun is shining.”
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The coming storm
Thursday, 12 April 2012
https://www.cosmosmagazine.com/files/imagecache/blog/files/features/print/20120412_superflare.jpg
Powerful X-class flares create radiation storms that produce auroras.
Credit: NASA
~ Wilson da Silva
IT’S NOW CLEAR that the solar storm of 1859 was the most powerful in recorded history, and the largest known solar flare.
When next one erupts – as scientists are now certain one will – the flare will wreak global chaos and likely bring our modern interconnected civilisation to a standstill.
Power surges up and down electrical grids could knock out thousands of transformers, shutting down power to many of the world’s biggest cities for weeks or months – transformers are not easily replaced. Mobile networks would go down, refrigeration fail, banks and stockmarkets would be forced to close and aircraft would lose access to navigation and GPS.
Why have we not been aware of this danger before? In a sense, we have: there have been a number of powerful solar flares in the past century, and they have knocked out power grids, scrambled communications and disrupted satellites. What’s changed is that scientists had thought that such events, although punishing, had localised effects. And they thought we’d already seen the worst.
Not so. Only recently, through clever detective work, have scientists realised just how powerful the massive superflare of 1859 was. But because it was the first documented sighting of a solar flare, and because our world was then largely devoid of electrical grids and electronic devices, the cascade of effects that followed were not understood or linked together. Telegraph operators reported sparks leaping off their equipment, melting wiring and starting fires; while auroras – usually confined near the poles – danced above the skies of Cuba and Hawaii, and as far north as Santiago, Chile.
ONLY OVER THE PAST decade, as scientists sought to understand the Sun’s more recent history, have scientists pieced together the 1859 Carrington Event, named after Richard C. Carrington, a British astronomer who just happened to be studying sunspots on 1 September 1859 when, at 11:18 am Greenwich Mean Time, the flare erupted. Such a severe solar storm today could leave cities dark for months.
“This is not a matter of if, it's simply a matter of when, and how big," said Jane Lubchenco, a celebrated U.S. marine ecologist and U.S. Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere who heads the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “We have every reason to expect we're going to be seeing more space weather in the coming years, and it behooves us to be smart and be prepared,” she added, speaking at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in February 2011.
After an unusually quiet period, the Sun is now again ramping up toward a new solar maximum, predicted to peak around 2013. A solar maximum is when the Sun’s stormy activity rises, triggering bigger flares and sunspot outbreaks – part of a roughly 11-year cycle. Interestingly, a similar quiet period preceded the 1859 event.
On Valentine’s Day 2011, a huge solar flare unleashed a wave of charged particles toward Earth, followed by coronal mass ejections, or blobs of plasma, that took days to arrive. When they did, they interacted with Earth's magnetic field to cause geomagnetic storms that wiped out radio communications in the western Pacific and parts of Asia, and caused airlines to reroute polar flights to avoid radio outages.
During the last solar maximum, the modern world wasn't as dependent on satellites, mobile phones and GPS as it is now. Bank transactions now use GPS signals as highly accurate clocks for time-stamping transactions: knock out GPS and the banking system and stock markets go with it.
It may not sound like it, but this is good news: it’s a disaster we can avoid. We can’t stop the Sun from flaring – nothing can halt a fusion reactor pouring out 386 billion billion megawatts of energy. But we can shut down our electrical grids and disconnect electronic devices before the pulse arrives – and allow the geomagnetic storm to pass, before turning it back on.
Sounds simple right? But to do so, we need to know just when such a superflare is coming. And that’s the problem: all that sits between us and a superflare is the Advance Composition Explorer (ACE) satellite, orbiting about 1.5 million km from Earth and 148.5 million km from the Sun, at the L1 Lagrange point where the gravitational field of the two bodies cancel each other out. ACE has a prime view of the solar wind and high-energy particles spewed out by the Sun toward Earth, and can give advance warning of 15 to 45 minutes for severe geomagnetic storms. But it was launched in August 1997 and is, as the U.S. National Academy of Sciences warned in 2009, “well beyond its planned operational life”. There is no backup. And we’ve just gone into another solar maximum. This is a clear case for another satellite to be sent up, or for even a string of them – before calamity strikes.
As former U.S. president John F. Kennedy once said, “The time to repair the roof is when the Sun is shining.”
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