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."
How would this affect our data? (Score:4, Interesting)
I would expect CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs to be reasonably safe (though any reading devices might be temporarily disabled or permanently damaged.) But what about HDDs? Are they sufficiently shielded against this?
Yes, losing power is a serious issue that will cost lives and losing GPS etc. would be very bad, too. But more and more of our cultural and scientific achievements are stored primarily on magnetic drives that may or may not be suitably shielded. How much at risk are those data, or should I invest in lead shielding for my backup storage drive?
Re:How would this affect our data? (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
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that's bad! Really bad! (Score:2)
'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.
No phone sex, no Big Brother and no pr0n feeds? OMG! We're doomed!
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And the people in southern Latitudes? (Score:3, Funny)
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Pacemakers? (Score:5, Interesting)
As a genuine cyborg, my first concern about such "electrical storm/attack" fears & warnings is their impact on pacemakers and other life-sustaining electronic devices.
Anyone have meaningful commentary thereon?
Re:Pacemakers? (Score:4, Insightful)
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The only possible effect I can think of are with the inductive coils on cochlear implants (and possibly other implants). It would depend on the number of coils on the receiver as to the effect, and could range from severe noise and inability to hear (likely) to painful volume or electric shocks (less likely).
the solar disruption works via induction (Score:2)
that is, a moving magnetic field inducing an electric current on a length of conductive material, usually a metal wire
so unless your pacemaker features a lead which extends a couple of yards outside your chest, you'll be fine
the problem is when the induction causes the transformers at the ends of high tensions wires to blow, with no replacement available
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I would not exactly make my life dependent on some comments on Slashdot, if you know what I mean. ;)
Everyone here thinks he’s an expert.
I’d ask someone (in private!) who actually earns money with getting your question right. :)
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Do the windows not void the shielding? (Dunno the wavelength.)
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Good point. The presence of Windows guarantees bad results.
Oh wait, we're not talking operating systems?
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The shielding is directional. Windows would have little effect if the sun is right above you, though you should probably try to get in the back seat.
Just try to stay in the EM shadow of something conductive. Yes, the radiation will "bend" around shielding in an attempt to get at you (EM is almost malevolent in that way, but it's just normal low-frequency wave action), but even if that happens you'll still have blocked *most* of it.
Governments won't do squat to prevent it. (Score:2)
We can't convince them of the dangers of asteroid collisions so how the FSCK are they going to believe about this.
They didn't believe about the dangers of Solar storms in 1989 so why would they buy it now?
http://www.google.ca/search?q=hydro+quebec+solar+blackout [google.ca]
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We can't convince them of the dangers of asteroid collisions so how the FSCK are they going to believe about this.
Well, there is one major difference: Montreal proved that this kind of thing can happen, and will happen again, whereas we've yet to see a major city devastated by a meteor impact.
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So don't depend on your government.
Your house will be intact if a geomagnetic storm hits. You just need to make sure you are able to survive the zombie apocalypse that will surely follow.
Umm, sorry, did I say that? Ignore it. I have no knowledge of an impending zombie apocalypse. Nor am I planning on being a zombie. Trust me.
You'll just need to make sure you have enough food, water, and heat to get by for a few weeks in case of a temporary collapse of services.
Oh, and canned brains. Keep lots of those
This current solar cycle (Score:2)
Solar Cycle 24 Prediction Updated May 2009 [noaa.gov]
2012-13: NOAA predicts solar cycle 24 ”weakest since 1928” with $1 trillion damages in worst case [examiner.com]. From second article:
Katrina? Really? (Score:2)
George Bush doesn't care about people with electronics!
How about we called it Solargate? Solartanic? Solarpocalypse?
ISS Residents (Score:2)
I was curious to see if they did any projection on whether the ISS is shielded enough for a storm of that scale. This article from 2005 (http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/27jan_solarflares.htm [nasa.gov]) seems to indicate ISS is heavily shielded. There was nothing in the OP's articles that indicated if the modeled storm would be strong enough to cause serious radiation damage to the residents.
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This would be at least a Category 8 Flare - meaning No the ISS is not sheilded sufficiently to protect the astronauts from it. Keep in mind that some of the shielding that the ISS uses is provided by the Earth's Magetic field as the station is in LEO (low earth orbit) which is the reason it completes its orbit is 91 minutes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station [wikipedia.org]
I forget... (Score:5, Funny)
What is a Katrina? (Score:3, Funny)
I didn't even read the summary because the title is stupid.
So what? (Score:3, Insightful)
I know it's almost cliche to make a joke about "not going outside" on
Re:So what? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not a matter of ability, it's a matter of population density. If you have access to enough food and water to live for several months and are reasonably assured there is no meaningful competition for those resources, you'll be fine.
In more rural areas, this is a non-issue. I live on 3 acres of land that include a dug well I can dip from, and I'm used to power outages and have 550 gallons of Kerosene for my furnace that can also be used to keep my KeroSun going for the better part of a year. My house water pipes are designed to be drained to keep them from freezing in an extended outage. I have a deep freeze full of food (I'd have to cook it as it thaws and preserve it that way), and lots of canned vegetables and fruit in the basement. I could probably get through an entire winter in reasonable comfort.
In a microapartment in the middle of the city, dependent on electricity for heat and city lines for water, something like this could turn into a big problem, really fast. They are currently being sustained by water that is treated and pumped to them. If power goes out, so do the treatment plants and the pumps. So you have to find untreated but safe water, and get it to them or them to it.
And keep in mind, power outages caused by geomagnetic storms can be continental in scale, and the damage can take weeks or months to repair. It's not likely, but it is possible, and this article is about a not-unrealistic worst case scenario. So you aren't going to be able to depend on much of anything.
How do you get fresh water every day to a city of 5 million people when there isn't electricity available for 500 miles in any direction? An 18-wheeler can haul about 8000 gallons of water. Assuming each person is limited to 2 quarts a day of water, you need over 300 trips per day. How do you distribute it? Can you sustain that for months? If you can't, where do you evacuate them all to? Is there enough water to sustain them? Is it safe, or does it need to be treated or boiled? Do they know how to get it without fouling it?
Now, say this happens in January. How do you keep them warm?
This article is about preparedness. Your house is fine, no need to grab the tent. Just be prepared for no electricity and no water for a month or so, and food may be hard to come by. Encourage your neighbors to do the same, or arm yourself. No big deal.
the carrington effect (Score:4, Interesting)
the problem is when the induction causes the transformers at the ends of high tensions wires to blow, with no replacement available
you can build circuit breakers into such transformers, but a cost-benefit-risk analysis hasn't sided yet on the side of caution, even though the cost is not great. and no, we don't have a ready supply of the right transformers sitting around
paradoxically, the poorest nations of the world will do fine, because they are less dependent on electricty and electronics, and are closer to the equator. while the electricity and electronics dependent northern hemisphere will experience severe long lasting societal shocks, involving the mass disruption of the internet, other communications, and all the vital uses the northern hemisphere has built into their electrical grid
so we're all screwed when (not if) the next carrington effect is observed, out of simple laziness and complacency. we have had plenty warning, and we have freely chosen not to protect ourselves from this threat with a simple low cost circuit breaker style set up
http://passingstrangeness.wordpress.com/2009/04/15/the-carrington-flare/ [wordpress.com]
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As bad as a nuclear war (Score:2)
Really. It wouldn't be months before we got the power back on. It might be years. It takes electricity to communicate, move goods by train, get oil and coal from point a to point b. I don't think anyone has really thought through just how devastating this would be.
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289540682618920354812781123456789 (Score:3, Funny)
Crosstalk over shortwave frequencies (Score:2)
The articles regarding multiple stations going over each other are intriguing. While propagation of radio varies depending on how the ionosphere reacts with sol, the question is could solar interference cause radio waves to change wavelengths? Meaning that 1440 ABC AM's broadcasts be shifted enough to interfere with 1400 or even 1350?
scifi novel "One Second After" (Score:4, Interesting)
Does it take them out (Score:2)
permanently or just until the storm passes?
I remember when satellite news cast were just starting and sometime Sun activity would take them down, bit only for 30-60 seconds.
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Any excuse for them to play with their tabletop Transformers roleplaying kit. I thought Megatron had given up on trying to harvest the power of the sun anyway?
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, Informative)
or chose to stop insuring their house when they no longer owed any payments on it
Although this doesn't affect your main point, it's worth mentioning that a lot of the folks who got no or a minimal insurance payment were insured against flood damage, but the insurance companies found creative ways not to pay. An example of the kind of thinking that was employed: your neighbor's house crashing through your living room isn't water damage, so we don't have to pay the flood policy on that damage. But because the incident in question was caused by a flood rather than a fire or tornado, we also don't have to pay the regular homeowner's policy. Therefore, you get only payment for cleaning up the water damage. Another common tactic was to refuse to pay unless the homeowner could provide documentation for their policy, which was of course lost in the flood.
In short, insurance offered very limited at best protection for New Orleans homeowners.
Re:Since when? (Score:4, Informative)
My own experience says otherwise.
Flood Insurance isn't the Insurance Company's money - it's federal dollars. So the insurance companies had very little incentive to not hand it out like candy.
I got a much larger payout on my flood insurance than on my regular homeowner's insurance, even though the water damage wasn't really all that severe on my house.
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Insurance adjusters were set up after the event; because of limited capacity on the insurers part, a lack of insurance adjusters in the market, and legal limitations on waiting on claims, they had tables with people writing checks for the full value of the houses in many cases, with visual confirmation of destruction, or in some cases based purely on the location of the house in an area with massive damage. Insurance companies, in many cases, paid out more in total than they expected to ever pay out for an
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I most certainly was there. I never saw any of what you describe. My family lost two fully insured homes, neither ever got paid for.
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But... but... government bad! Regulation bad! Insurers good! Private industry good!
Why can't you understand this???
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> a few tens of thousands who chose to live below sea level
Your casting this as innocent vs willing is completely ignorant. Why don't those, "um, 100 million people" whom you more sympathize with just "choose" to live off the grid? Problem solved.
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Don't be absurd. You can choose to live above sea level without significant hardship.
Re:Since when? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, I can. I can also choose to live outside tornado alley, or away from the San Andreas fault, or inside a gated community.
But it's naive to think everybody in America has the same options as the average slashdotter. Many of the people who "chose" not to leave NOLA in the time leading up to Katrina couldn't. Some didn't have money for bus tickets, or a way to transport a bed-ridden family member. Disregard them if it lets you sleep better, but those are facts.
People don't "choose" to live in trailer parks or crime-ridden neighborhoods or their car purely out of foolishness; people with less money have fewer options. Blame them for their "choices" if you want, but if they could afford a safer place they'd choose it.
In any natural disaster, the poor will be disproportionately affected. It's just a market reality.
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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.
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(ever heard of rewinding)
That would work great if all utilities keep enough spare transformer wire and insulating paper on hand to rebuild most of their transformers, and they train their staff to do the highly technical work required to safely assemble a high-powered transformer.
However, what are the odds of that amount of foresight happening in the real world? Just about nil.
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The approximately DC surge from a CME saturates the cores, this leads to high currents that can over heat just about everything within the transformer. However breakers etc will still protect many transformers from this type of
Re:Since when? (Score:4, Informative)
Rewinding uses the same windings. Not new ones..
Yeah, I'm sure that electrical arcs and overheating don't damage copper wires at all. They'll still be able to handle thousands of amps. Just reuse it!
Considering that big portions of power grids have crumbled like dominoes on their own just because of minor instabilities in normal generation, I don't think its safe to say that safety systems would work in a worst-case solar storm.
BTW, I saw manufacturing power transformers on one of those "how they make it" shows. It wasn't exactly a simple process. They used special machines to precisely arrange the rather thick, inflexible "wires" (more like thin bars) around the core. This isn't a toy train set.
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The grids went down (in the US) because the breakers protected all the transformers and other expensive equipment. Other grids around the world are in fact better maintained... but still have breakers.
When did i suggested it was a friken train set. We are talking national level emergency here. There are lots of options, including but not limited to fixing a chuck of infrastructure that's not badly damaged.
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When did i suggested it was a friken train set.
When you said "Just rewind it!" like you could stick the core on your dad's drill press and give it a spin.
Like I pointed out, the wires won't be reusable. More wire will have to be found, national emergency or not.
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I lived in the Central area of Auckland NZ when they
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Re:Since when? (Score:4, Interesting)
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
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Any excuse to be an asshole eh.
And if you really don't have power for months. Why the frak wouldn't repair some transformers...?
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 would
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But in all seriousness. I have been in this situation twice. Everyone pulled together, not apart. And though huge amounts of property and money was lost. We all carried on just fine.
Also I think you are over estimating the importance of electricity. It really isn't the end of the world not having power for a bit. Hell some rural areas a re
but that's exactly my point (Score:2)
third world/ rural areas would do fine: they are used to no power, and their lives have been set up to function just fine without power
but an entire modern large city? the entire northern hemisphere? without power on the scale of weeks?
you can't possibly be trying to honestly compare the occasional power outages of some sleepy prairie town that is used to it, to a weeks long power outage in a modern major city
nevermind the entire northern hemisphere. you honestly can't imagine that the scale, length of time
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Also its not going to be everything. Breakers do protect against this sort of thing, and hell some transformers are not even at risk (DC isolation). We really won't need to replace everything. Well not from any report I have ever read on the matter.
my point is (Score:2)
you are extremely complacent on the issue, and this complacency is dangerous
"at that massive scale I think you completely underestimate just what we are capable of"
what? we hold hands and sing kumbaya and use our magical karma to telekinetically rewind blown transformers? what are we capable of exactly in a major urban area descending into confusion, hysteria, and chaos?
sure, plenty, the MAJORITY will ride out the extended period of no electricity just fine. i'm not painting you a picture of armageddeon its
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Keep in mind also that the transformer-winding factories will themselves be out of power. I'm sure transformers aren't made in caves using elves and magical power. It's kind of a chicken-and-egg scenario but I imagine that making transformers also requires electricity. So whatever the transformer-production capacity is now, consider t
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...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....
Minor nitpick: I'm guessing you're not familiar with ARES [wikipedia.org]. All you need for radio communication is a transmitter and a receiver, and both can be powered by batteries. I have a handheld unit that has a range of approximately 80-100 miles and can be recharged with a solar cell and I have a base station that can contact people across the entire planet under the right conditions (solar activity actually helps) and can also be battery operated.
While communications may be a little slower they wouldn't shut dow
agreed (Score:2)
there will be plenty of jury rigged communication solutions that will make up for the failure of mass media. ham radio hobbyists will become the backbone of society. however, in the meantime, and even during, due to simple issues concerning lack of community and lack of trust, and flat out fearmongering and hysteria, all sorts of insane rumors will spread, people will act unwisely on these falsehoods, and tragedy will result, time and again, in a number of places
the majority will ride the extended hemispher
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Strange that the experts disagree with you.
Or perhaps not so strange?
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As for the level of disaster. Its not like it doesn't happen. Its not going to kill everyone and the experts *do* say that. You know not having the internet/phone etc for a few weeks is not the end, though I can understand why some my feel this way.
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Bullshit.
A: New Orleans had a population of about 300 thousand. not tens of thousands.
B: There were over 3 million people severely affected by hurricane Katrina. The radius of destruction was over 200 kilometers.
C: The problem was not people who were uninsured. It was people who were insured and the insurance company refused to pay their rightful claims, delayed payments for years or attempted to pay less than they owed.
D: We were literally told by insurance companies that they were not going to pay because
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Re:Since when? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Since when? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Since when? (Score:4, Insightful)
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What we need is a planetary Faraday Cage!
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Um, no. (Score:5, Interesting)
You're mixing up two effects. You're correct that the direct EM radiation would affect largely only the sunlit portion of the Earth. However, the "second punch" of these events is the large burst of protons that arrives the next day -- it's the solar wind, but several orders of magnitude larger than usual.
These protons are affected by the geomagnetic field, and (to simplify a lot) rain down in large regions generally centered around the magnetic poles (cf. the auroral ovals [noaa.gov]), where they induce very large currents in long conductors like power lines, leading to general power failures that could not be easily repaired.
This wouldn't be your garden-variety blackout -- it would require physical replacement of massive equipment for which there are no spares readily available -- at least not in the quantities needed. Large numbers of people -- entire provinces and states in North America, and likely entire nations in northern Europe -- would be without power for months while new equipment was manufactured and installed. This would lead to mass migrations out of these areas, which would lead to social disruption and significant loss of life as critical systems, whose backup generators and other emergency systems were not designed for such an extended outage, failed.
I was in south Florida for Hurricane Wilma [wikipedia.org], and I can report to you that the social structure of the region almost broke down during the week or two the region was without electricity -- and this was a natural disaster, albeit a severe one, that people understood and had largely prepared for. Power was restored relatively quickly then, because (a) the causes, downed power lines, were easy to find and repair, and (b) there was a massive influx of utility workers from the rest of the country to help out. In a solar flare scenario, the cause would be much harder to fix, and there would be a much larger affected area (and, consequently, a much smaller unaffected area from which to draw support).
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For all we know, the sun could punch us with an event two or three times stronger than previously recorded scenarios and we'd never see it coming, much less have designed equipment to survive those parameters.
Apparently you don't understand what circuit breakers do. The larger the event, the more likely they are to trip. Not all of them will, because hardware fails sometimes, but the comparison with the 2003 overload is apt. The hysteria we're seeing here is being generated by the assumption that long power lines will continue to be connected to transformers while everything overloads, despite the known placement of devices specifically designed to prevent such overloading.
And you're saying, "Yeah, but what
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Do you honestly believe power companies don't protect their multi billion dollar investments?
Probably not well, no. See, what you describe is long-term disaster planning, and it's the kind of thing the corporations that own that infrastructure aren't terribly good at. Unless they can see this disaster coming in the next quarter, frankly, the won't do much about it.
Really, one need to only look back at the NYC blackout, or the rolling brownouts in California, to see how effective corporate thinking is in t
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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,
Re:Since when? (Score:5, Informative)
Since when did solar flares change tides and throw debries around to cause massive flooding, and random destruction.
They don't. They only take out services. Over VERY large areas, for long periods of time. Your house is safe, but it'll be cold and dark and no one will answer the phone at Dominos.
With Katrina, there was some warning, and there were safe areas 50 miles away that still had power, water, food, and communications. People could be evacuated to those areas. Katrina was a big problem over a small area, and people survived by moving short distances to areas that had services.
A solar geomagnetic storm could be a smaller problem over a much larger area. Imagine the power going out at every house north of the Mason Dixon line in the US and up into Canada. Where do you send people? Nowhere. You tell them to stay the hell home. But what are they going to eat and drink, and how will they stay warm?
The important thing is that power, water, heat, telephone, Internet, and even radio communications (including aviation navigation and shortwave) could all go away at once, and some or all of them might be out for an extended period of time. It could literally take months to restore services to some areas. And this could potentially be on a continental scale. Additionally, an X-Class geomagnetic storm can damage unshielded electronics. Your PC, cell phone, modem, etc may or may not work even if power and Internet come back. Your car may not function even if fuel is readily available. Your backup generator may not start. They may all need expensive repairs, and you'll have to wait a while because everyone else will be in the same situation.
There's no need for panic, of course, but TFA doesn't mention panic. It mentions preparedness. I think it's perfectly prudent to prepare in much the same way as you would for a hurricane or major snowstorm, because you may suffer from the same lack of readily available food, water, and heat. Except something like this cannot be predicted, so you have to be prepared all the time. Oh, and you don't need plywood, unless you plan on burning it for heat. :)
This is more of a city problem, because city services might go away in a hurry, and a dense population means more immediate dependence on common resources that will go away. The water will run out in the first week, if not sooner. Food before that, probably, but people can get by without food for a few days.
More rural folks have wells we can dip for safe drinking water, campstoves with lots of fuel we can use for cooking, and heaters that don't depend on electricity but are designed to be used safely indoors. This will be an annoyance, little more. We get power outages and major snowstorms all the time, and we don't really need to go anywhere for a while if things get bad - we'll just hunker down and start rationing out the food we canned away or put in the deep freezer.
It's simple. Take your dwelling (apartment, house, condo, whatever). Play a mental game where you have to depend ONLY on whatever you have on your property for one month. If that doesn't concern you, you're probably good, as long as your neighbors have gone through the same mental exercise OR you are better armed than they are. :)
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.
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Binladen by very small bins.
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The major disaster from Katrina was that it took the government[s - city, state, and federal -] so long to respond after the storm hit to help those that were stuck.
FTFY
The living underneath sea level line is old also. Every area in the country is succesptible to some sort of natural disaster. Be it hurricanes, tornadoes, earth quakes , mud slides, snow storms etc. So are we not supposed to live in any of those areas?
With the possible exception of mud slides, none of the above are human engineered disasters (unless you count choosing where to live). Living under sea level, you're doomed to flooding at some point, and since it took human engineering to live under sea level, it was (and still is) entirely preventable. Katrina was made so dangerous _because_ of the poor city design. New Orleans is like Galloping Gertie (Tacoma Narrows Bridge), except it's Too Big To Fail (TM).
Re:Causality or coincidence? (Score:2)
Could get colder, or not. Maybe France gets a new Sun King?
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Because the term's already been used for specific types of waves reflected through the sun:
I have reason to believe that this anonymous message in "STEREO Satellites Spot Solar Flare Tsunami" was posted by Joe Gurman, the Project Scientist for NASA's STEREO mission. (and for TRACE, and US Project Scientist for SOHO, and the head of the Solar Data Analysis Center) :
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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 r
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Wouldn't that be redundant?
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