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Just when you thought it was safe to go outside

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#1 ·
Wasn't aware of the 1859 event.....pretty damn scary if it happened now...

Bracing the Satellite Infrastructure for a Solar Superstorm

A recurrence of the 1859 solar superstorm would be a cosmic Katrina, causing billions of dollars of damage to satellites, power grids and radio communications

By Sten F. Odenwald and James L. Green

* The solar superstorm of 1859 was the fiercest ever recorded. Auroras filled the sky as far south as the Caribbean, magnetic compasses went haywire and telegraph systems failed.
* Ice cores suggest that such a blast of solar particles happens only once every 500 years, but even the storms every 50 years could fry satellites, jam radios and cause coast-to-coast blackouts.
* The cost of such an event justifies more systematic solar monitoring and beefier protection for satellites and the power grid.

As night was falling across the Americas on Sunday, August 28, 1859, the phantom shapes of the auroras could already be seen overhead. From Maine to the tip of Florida, vivid curtains of light took the skies. Startled Cubans saw the auroras directly overhead; ships’ logs near the equator described crimson lights reaching halfway to the zenith. Many people thought their cities had caught fire. Scientific instruments around the world, patiently recording minute changes in Earth’s magnetism, suddenly shot off scale, and spurious electric currents surged into the world’s telegraph systems. In Baltimore telegraph operators labored from 8 p.m. until 10 a.m. the next day to transmit a mere 400-word press report.

Just before noon the following Thursday, September 1, English astronomer Richard C. Carrington was sketching a curious group of sunspots—curious on account of the dark areas’ enormous size. At 11:18 a.m. he witnessed an intense white light flash from two locations within the sunspot group. He called out in vain to anyone in the observatory to come see the brief five-minute spectacle, but solitary astronomers seldom have an audience to share their excitement. Seventeen hours later in the Americas a second wave of auroras turned night to day as far south as Panama. People could read the newspaper by their crimson and green light. Gold miners in the Rocky Mountains woke up and ate breakfast at 1 a.m., thinking the sun had risen on a cloudy day. Telegraph systems became unusable across Europe and North America.

The news media of the day looked for researchers able to explain the phenomena, but at the time scientists scarcely understood auroral displays at all. Were they meteoritic matter from space, reflected light from polar icebergs or a high-altitude version of lightning? It was the Great Aurora of 1859 itself that ushered in a new paradigm. The October 15 issue of Scientific American noted that ‘‘a connection between the northern lights and forces of electricity and magnetism is now fully established.” Work since then has established that auroral displays ultimately originate in violent events on the sun, which fire off huge clouds of plasma and momentarily disrupt our planet’s magnetic field.


The impact of the 1859 storm was muted only by the infancy of our technological civilization at that time. Were it to happen today, it could severely damage satellites, disable radio communications and cause continent-wide electrical blackouts that would require weeks or longer to recover from. Although a storm of that magnitude is a comfortably rare once-in-500-years event, those with half its intensity hit every 50 years or so. The last one, which occurred on November 13, 1960, led to worldwide geomagnetic disturbances and radio outages. If we make no preparations, by some calculations the direct and indirect costs of another superstorm could equal that of a major hurricane or earthquake.

The Big One
The number of sunspots, along with other signs of solar magnetic activity, waxes and wanes on an 11-year cycle. The current cycle began this past January; over the coming half a decade, solar activity will ramp up from its current lull. During the previous 11 years, 21,000 flares and 13,000 clouds of ionized gas, or plasma, exploded from the sun’s surface. These phenomena, collectively termed solar storms, arise from the relentless churning of solar gases. In some ways, they are scaled-up versions of terrestrial storms, with the important difference that magnetic fields lace the solar gases that sculpt and energize them. Flares are analogous to lightning storms; they are bursts of energetic particles and intense x-rays resulting from changes in the magnetic field on a relatively small scale by the sun’s standards, spanning thousands of kilometers. So-called coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are analogous to hurricanes; they are giant magnetic bubbles, millions of kilometers across, that hurl billion-ton plasma clouds into space at several million kilometers per hour.
4 more interesting pages.. Bracing the Satellite Infrastructure for a Solar Superstorm: Scientific American

it's a good and cautionary read.....tho what any individual could do..???

Can you imagine the aurora displays in that relatively clear era with little light pollution :eek: ...and to the Caribbean and even visible from the equator!!!!!!
 
#2 ·
I think it's quaint the way you think people still read. :)

(I post this as someone who still reads stuff like this, long scientific articles, for pleasure and learning ... but really, have you looked at the new generation? You'll have to boil this down to visual graphic if you want them to "grok" it ...)
 
#9 ·
I think it's quaint the way you think people still read. :)
can I have the cliff notes, too many letters, too much brain power to convert them into words. Is there a picture I can look at instead? What about redoing the article in TXT speak???
 
#7 ·
It is a very real phenomenon that can do so very much damage in today's world. We have become so dependent on electronics of various types, and it was only fourteen years ago when the Anik E1 and E2 satellites were damaged by solar activities, and some major power outages have been caused by solar activity as well. We are even more dependent upon small geometry electronics, as well as satellites, so a profoundly large solar event could really unhinge things.

If one considers the fact that an atmospheric nuclear blast can (and has) destroyed electronics out as far as a thousand miles because of electro-magnetic pulse, these things really should be of concern. In fact, computers used for nuclear warfare are designed with vacuum tubes, since EMP is pretty good for cleaning the plates of the tubes, long after any transistor has been vapourized. Even a single cosmic ray, of the right energy, can ruin a regular memory chip and crash a typical computer because of a Single Event Upset...
 
#11 ·
Here ya go

Bracing d Satellite Infrastructure 4 a sola Superstorm A recurrence of d 1859 sola superstorm wd B a cosmic Katrina, cauzN billions of $ of dmagj 2 satellites, pwr grids n radio communications By Sten F. Odenwald n James L. Green * d sola superstorm of 1859 wz d fiercest evr recordd. Auroras filD d sky as fr sth as d caribbean, magnetic compasses went haywire n telegraph systems fAled. * Ice cores sugest dat sucha blast of sola partic ...
:D
 
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