An Exercise To Model a "Solar Radiation Katrina" 225
Hugh Pickens writes in with an update on the warnings we discussed a year back about the dangers of a "solar Katrina." Now NPR is reporting on a tabletop exercise mounted in Boulder, Colorado by government workers attempting to model the effects of a worst-case solar electromagnetic storm. "...an exercise held in Boulder, Colorado, has investigated what might happen if the Earth were struck by a solar storm as intense as the huge storms that occurred in 1921 and 1859 — a sort of solar Katrina — and researchers found that the impact is likely to be far worse than in previous solar storms because of our growing dependence on satellites and other electronic devices that are vulnerable to electromagnetic radiation. 'In many ways, the impact of a major solar storm resembles that of a hurricane or an earthquake,' says FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate, except that a solar Katrina would cause damage in a much larger area — power could be knocked out almost simultaneously in countries from Sweden to Canada and the US. In the exercise, the first sign of trouble came when radiation began disrupting radio signals and GPS devices, says Tom Bogdan, who directs the Space Weather Prediction Center. Ten or 20 minutes later electrically charged particles 'basically took out' most of the commercial satellites that transmit telephone conversations, TV shows, and huge amounts of data we depend on in our daily lives. But the worst damage came nearly a day later, when the solar storm began to induce electrical currents in high voltage power lines strong enough to destroy transformers around the globe, leaving millions of people in northern latitudes without power."
Re:Since when? (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, 100 million people without power for a few months is a much bigger deal than a few tens of thousands who chose to live below sea level, or chose to stop insuring their house when they no longer owed any payments on it.
The key problem about the flare is the rate of production of transformers -- it would be literally months before much of the northern part of the US and Canada got power back.
If that happens during the winter, you're talking a LOT of people freezing to death.
Re:Since when? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Since when? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Pacemakers? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:How would this affect our data? (Score:3, Insightful)
Your computer and HDDs will still keep working, assuming you can get power for them.
Plus or minus power surges on connected, powered up equipment.
More accurately, everything on the shelves at your local computer store will be OK. Stuff thats plugged into a power outlet (ATX supplies never turn completely off), or has a long cable attached (ethernet?) maybe not so good.
Re:that's bad! Really bad! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Since when? (Score:2, Insightful)
The idea that everyone would just sit around twiddling their thumbs for months without power is totally laughable. That they would sit around waiting to freeze to death is plain stupid.
So what? (Score:3, Insightful)
I know it's almost cliche to make a joke about "not going outside" on
Re:Since when? (Score:2, Insightful)
I think a solar flare varies in intensity over the sphere represented by Earth's orbit.
There is a mass of charged particles tossed out that take a number of hours to reach Earth's orbit. There is also a flare of radiation that gets here in 9 minutes.
From what I read this radiation, magnetic as well as assorted stuff from Gamma to long wave radio spreads out uniformly and is spread over a large area by the time it hits Earth's orbit.
The large lump of particles is far smaller and might miss the earth, pass close by or whack us. If it whacks us, we get these large induced currents in long lines and the peak volts associated with them, so with a solar flare known to be in transit we need to snoop it to see where the ejected material is going to hit and when. With this knowledge we can close down some transmission lines and produce a man made blackout of short duration that we can end in a controlled manner, with little or no destruction of lines and transformers. Once the flare has passed, back to the way we were. As for satellites? Possibly they can be powered down or placed into a mode that minimizes the flare damage, and then turned on afterwards, and we will suffer less destruction, but we will have the interruption of services as a lesser evil.
Re:Since when? (Score:4, Insightful)
Asia and Africa lose electricity and there goes all those lovely cell phones, or any phones. Asian cities lose power to keep those sewage plants and water supplies running and disease starts taking hold in a big way. Asia loses electricity and you can't even use trains very effectively because you use electricity to control traffic, so food and medicine supplies are diminished.
Thinking this would only effect white people in Europe and the Americas is racist nonsense. Thinking that people in Asia and Africa don't depend on electricity and petroleum as much as Europeans and people in the Americas is potentially dangerous delusion.
Re:Since when? (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't be absurd. You can choose to live above sea level without significant hardship.
your false complacency s worse than false alarmism (Score:5, Insightful)
nobody is going to be rewinding transformers like macgyver. that's a serious buttload of skilled work, with equipment and supplies that is not easily at hand
furthermore, the canada disruption you are referring to is tiny in comparison to a carrington effect-level event. it won't be days at most, but weeks at a minimum. we simply haven't invested in the transformers protection or backup or the transformer repair skill/ capacity
and no one is saying people will just be sitting around twiddling their thumbs. in fact, some will be emphatically looting. and the police cruisers will soon run out of gas since most stations use electric gas pumps. nevermind that after the generators die in a few days/ hours, communications will be down across radio, television, and internet, so the police, and the population, will be left to guess what is going on and when everything will be back to normal. throw in a little hysteria, and you can imagine the results in major cities
people WILL freeze to death, simply because they will NOT just sit around, but panic and venture out in the cold out of complete ignorance and fright
do you consider me alarmist? out of intellectual honesty, i will say it is possible i am straying too far into alarmism in my comments
however, to whatever degree i am straying into alarmism, you are straying much further and much more dangerously into complacency on this issue, that is for sure. in other words, your complacency here is far more dangerous than my alarmism
i see (Score:3, Insightful)
only americans are guilty of and prone to simple human weaknesses, like hysteria
"i can say people don't behave like that where i live"
i'm glad that you are ethnocentric. this blindness would perhaps be a wonderful way to describe your nationality, if i were to ascribe to this sort of prejudice, which i don't. but you do. and if this is how you inform your assumed sense of superiority, who am i to judge? after all, i'm just an asshole american
"And if you really don't have power for months. Why the frak wouldn't repair some transformers"
i'm glad your dad showed you how to wrap copper wire and build a rudimentary radio when you were seven years old. based on the vast technological and engineering and organizational acumen this experience invested you with as to declare the repair of thousands of power station transformers at the same time without functional communication or electricity source, please do us the favor of contacting your local power authority and instructing them as to how easy it is to do
but thank you for correcting me: i can see that your problem isn't a false sense of complacency. it is instead a smug sense of condescension and superiority, combined with simple ignorance of the factors involved
Re:Since when? (Score:3, Insightful)
But... but... government bad! Regulation bad! Insurers good! Private industry good!
Why can't you understand this???
Re:Since when? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why not a a solar tsunami? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why does any disaster have to be Katrina, especially when there is no comparison to the scope or nature of Katrina.
Because they are comparing the effects, not the scope or nature. Katrina caused a lack of food and water for an urban population. The cause will be different, but the same lack will be present.
I find the dialogue to be western centric and kind of out of touch
It's a study by the American government on the effects of a geomagnetic storm hitting the United States on the American electric grid. How would do you expect it NOT to be American-centric? America doesn't run the electric grid in your country, and your electric grid is probably different from ours. If you want relevant data for your grid, you'll need to do it with relevant local data. Have your government ask for a copy of this study. I'm sure the Americans will gladly offer it up if your country is friendly and asks nicely. Then your country can use it as the basis for your own analysis and study. Then it can be as [insert your country name here]-centric as you need it to be.
Honestly, the challenges are going to be different, so the study has to be done bearing in mind the specific geographic challenges.
Oh noes! My data is not available to me!!
Electricity will be gone, which means for a significant portion of the population of America potable water will be gone. Large cities everywhere are utterly dependent on electricity for basic services due to extreme population density, and in some cities the body count clock starts ticking within a few days of power loss. The higher the population density, the more interdependent people are.
What about places where lack of electricity is all it takes to cripple a water purification system or a hospital?
As in New York City? Boston? Los Angeles?
Honestly, this study is relatively useless outside America and maybe Europe. And some areas in Europe might have even been smart and put circuit breakers in their transformers. America sure as hell didn't, and that means our entire mains grid is now at risk due to geomagnetic interference. Those transformers have to be replaced one by one, and there is one of them for each and every house in my area. Plus there are some HUGE ones at power substations that supply entire towns. The power company keeps a supply of all their various types of transformers them because they do burn out and go BOOM, but they might have 5-10% of what they'd need if every one of them toasts out across the entire grid. It'll take time to make the rest.
Subsaharan Africa doesn't have as sophisticated a power grid, power tends to be generated more locally, so a water purification system in Africa is probably not going to suffer from any ill effect due to the collapse of a power grid. Not to mention most rural areas haven't built up the dependence on electricity. Their response will be markedly different than, say, New York City, or Boston. Especially in the winter when people will freeze to death in a few days if they aren't prepared. You can't leave the high-rise and start a fire, and if you can the other 4,999,999 people around you will all have the same need, and you'll run out of fuel in a couple of days, even if you treat the library and Central Park as fuel sources.