How a solar storm two years ago nearly caused a catastrophe on Earth

Is this a concern? Will we suddenly be sent back to the 1850's because of a flare or will there be back up plans? Or is that the problem; there are no significant backup plans?

Should we keep a supply of non electronic vehicles or trains just in case or will the effect of such an event make it that there's just no point? Are we too committed to the way of the computer that if there was a huge solar flare that we just let it happen?

Do we just make sure critical infrastructure electronics are protected or have a non electronic backup just in case? I don't really know how it works in such an event.

If we are hit by a massive flare and sent back to 1850 would this item be in demand (a brand new coal powered steam engine)?

LNER Peppercorn Class A1 60163 Tornado - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Or will older diesels be able to be bodged back into service? Or will it just be the end of the world as we know it?

 

Would everything electronic be fried? Or would it just be things that were switched on at the time of the flare? Or would some items still survive? Could some items like the electric grid be back up and running within a few days or would it really be a return to 1850?

 

I thought it was everything unshielded...

 

So everything other than certain military applications?

 

From the article it seems only uninsulated poorly grounded telegraph wires are actually at risk. I guess that might be a problem when we are sent back to 1859 but I'd be more concerned about showing up just in time for the Civil War. But just in case
Home - Lehman's
I like Chicken Little news. It tastes good.

 

You are thinking of EMP, from nuclear devices detonated just above the atmosphere.

For a major solar event, the damage would be to satellites in orbit, and to electrical things on the ground that have large geographic size, such as telegraph lines and power grids. Your isolated battery powered devices, such as flashlights and non-plugin motor vehicles, will be fine.

 

i'm gonna go buy what's left of the tinfoil...

 

No tinfoil needed. I was just curious and was mixing up emp and solar flares. So if we're all fine down here on Earth, then who cares if a few satellites go pop. I'm on cable.

 

i still have my copper phone line.

 

GC, the signal you get through the cable is beamed from a satellite. Maybe everything gets fried, maybe not. Those of us so dependent on electricity will be screwed. Those who live without it won't notice a difference.

After the hurricane gasoline was in short supply in affected areas. Not because there was a shortage of product. Not because deliveries couldn't be made. There wasn't a manual or mechanical process in place to pump it out of the underground tank.

That coal fired Stanley Steamer will be looking pretty good.

 

None of the stations had portable generators to run their pumps?

 

2012 July was a very energetic event. The swath of the thing by my eye was 1/4 of the earth orbital circumference. This may indicate the chance of getting hit by such flares. Next thing would be to estimate the frequency of such, and that may be possible. It may have been done in the Space Weather journal article (have not read). Certainly we have good statistics about frequency of smaller flares since the solar satellites have been up. Longer from solar observatories (100 yrs?).

The bigger ones are rarer (obviously) and statistical models predicting rare events from common ones are many and make diverse predictions. Not sure that's gonna help much.

Over time there is no doubt that we will get hit again like 1859. As no one is stepping up to answer "when", better look at it from the other end. What electromagnetic tech are most vulnerable, what is the potential damage cost, and what is the cost for protective shielding? Orbital satellites (at least the current generation) seem unshieldable. They may be even more fragile than all that, because we now use satellite info to avoid satellite/debris crashes, If that goes offline, then ... heck I don't know.

Satellites do what they do by speaking to parabolic dishes down here. At any given moment, a fraction of those dishes are 'looking at' the sun within some narrow angle. Should a big slug of protons come our way, can you just imagine all those low-noise block converters (or analogous technology) at the focal points turning to slag?

Not a topic to lose sleep over. OTOH, assuming that it won't happen or is not even worth considering mitigating against is perhaps not a good example of useful thinking.

 

If all the satellites were trashed it would be the end of GPS, weather and Earth observation, Direct/Sky TV, and satellite phones. But the Internet in most places would keep right on working pretty well the way it does now, as almost all traffic worldwide is carried by fiber optic cable.

The exception to this would be in (generally under-developed) countries with no widespread wired infrastructure, where local area networks in remote locations which have to rely on satellite communications for their internet connection would be off-line.

However, I'm pretty sure another 1859 event would also take out the power grid, in which case all bets are off.

 

Those protons should not follow straight optical lines down those parabolic dishes, but instead get diverted along Earth's magnetic field lines to the general vicinity of the magnetic poles.

But that diversion is not without consequence. All that current (moving electric charges) and mass throws those magnetic field lines around, putting them into motion. Whenever a wire moves in a magnetic field, or vice versa, voltage is produced along the wire, and current may flow if there is a suitable circuit.

Earth's magnetic fields are weak enough that the disturbances in the short wires inside the parabolic dish's low noise converter should be miniscule and negligible. But the powerlines feeding it, hundreds or thousands of kilometers long, will pick up far greater disturbances. These tend to want to flow as an imbalance in the transformer banks at the ends, causing varies problems including destructive failures. Local off-grid generation should be fine thanks to short line lengths.

Long metal telephone, telegraph, and undersea cables will also suffer problems. Fiber optic lines should be fine, though any metallic shielding around them may have problems.

 

There haven't been any telegraph lines since the 1960s! And undersea communications cables are all fiber optic (since the late 1980s) and have no shielding, but they do use copper conductors to carry the high voltage DC which powers their repeaters (amplifiers inserted in the cable about every 20 miles). However, I suspect the water surrounding the cables would protect them from the worst of the effects.

 

Oh...I do not know.
Some of my more militant "green" friends would have worded it something like:
How a solar storm two years ago nearly saved the Earth

 

I think what you meant to say was:

- .... . .-. . / .... .- ...- . -. .----. - / -... . . -. / .- -. -.-- / - . .-.. . --. .-. .- .--. .... / .-.. .. -. . ... / ... .. -. -.-. . / - .... . / .---- ----. -.... ----- ... / ... - --- .--.​

I hope this helps.

 

. -..- .- -.-. - .-.. -.-- !