- 3528 - SOLAR FLARES - how disruptive could they be? When the next big solar storm does blast out of our star, people on Earth will have about 13 hours to prepare for its arrival. Let's hope we're ready to make the most of that time when it inevitably arrives.
------------------ 3528 - SOLAR FLARES - how disruptive could they be?
- There a lot of things happening that we are just not aware of. We live in our cocoons. We are constantly being bombarded by flares and electrons that just don’t reach our senses. Much of it comes from our friendly Sun.
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- But, the underwater cables that connect nations can go offline for months because the Sun is showering Earth with a mist of these magnetized particles. It is called the “solar wind“.
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- For the most part, our planet's magnetic shield blocks this electric wind from doing any real damage to Earth or its inhabitants, instead sending those particles skittering toward the poles and leaving behind a beautiful aurora in their wake.
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- Sometimes that wind escalates into a full-blown solar storm the results of such extreme space weather could be catastrophic to our modern way of life.
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- A severe solar storm could plunge the world into an "internet apocalypse" that keeps large swaths of society offline for weeks or months at a time. Our infrastructure is not prepared for these large-scale solar events.
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- Extreme solar storms ( “coronal mass ejections“) are relatively rare; scientists estimate the probability of an extreme space weather directly impacting Earth to be between 1.6% to 12% per decade.
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- In recent history, only two such storms have been recorded, one in 1859 and the other in 1921. The earlier incident, known as the “Carrington Event“, created such a severe geomagnetic disturbance on Earth that telegraph wires burst into flame, and auroras, usually only visible near the planet's poles, were spotted near equatorial Colombia.
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- Smaller storms can also pack a punch; one in March 1989 blacked out the entire Canadian province of Quebec for nine hours. Since then, human civilization has become much more reliant on the global internet, and the potential impacts of a massive geomagnetic storm on that new infrastructure remain largely unstudied.
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- The good news is, local and regional internet connections are likely at low risk of being damaged because fiber-optic cables themselves aren't affected by geo-magnetically induced currents.
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- However, the long undersea internet cables that connect continents are a different story. These cables are equipped with repeaters to boost the optical signal, spaced at intervals of roughly 30 to 90 miles. These repeaters are vulnerable to geomagnetic currents, and entire cables could be made useless if even one repeater goes offline.
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- If enough undersea cables fail in a particular region, then entire continents could be cut off from one another. Nations at higher latitudes are far more susceptible to solar weather than nations at lower latitudes. In the event of a catastrophic geomagnetic storm, it's those high-latitude nations that are most likely to be cut off from the network first.
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- Millions of people could lose their livelihoods. The economic impact of an Internet disruption for a day in the US is estimated to be over $7 billion. Grid operators need to start taking the threat of extreme solar weather seriously as global internet infrastructure inevitably expands. Laying more cables at lower latitudes is a good start.
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- When the next big solar storm does blast out of our star, people on Earth will have about 13 hours to prepare for its arrival.
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- The sun is always showering Earth with a mist of magnetized particles known as solar wind. Our planet's magnetic shield blocks this electric wind from doing any real damage to Earth or its inhabitants, instead sending those particles skittering toward the poles and leaving behind a pleasant aurora in their wake.
-
- Grid operators need to start taking the threat of extreme solar weather seriously as global internet infrastructure inevitably expands. Laying more cables at lower latitudes is a good start.
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- When the next big solar storm does blast out of our star, people on Earth will have about 13 hours to prepare for its arrival. Let's hope we're ready to make the most of that time when it inevitably arrives. The best results go unnoticed.
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April 1, 2022 SOLAR FLARES - how disruptive could they be? 3528
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