News of the biggest solar blast in years and the accompanying photos, are all over the news. Last year I posted this from New Scientist on what I thought was a credible space storm threat:
IT IS midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.
A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation’s infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event – a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun.
It sounds ridiculous. Surely the sun couldn’t create so profound a disaster on Earth. Yet an extraordinary report funded by NASA and issued by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in January this year claims it could do just that.
Over the last few decades, western civilisations have busily sown the seeds of their own destruction. Our modern way of life, with its reliance on technology, has unwittingly exposed us to an extraordinary danger: plasma balls spewed from the surface of the sun could wipe out our power grids, with catastrophic consequences.
The projections of just how catastrophic make chilling reading. “We’re moving closer and closer to the edge of a possible disaster,” says Daniel Baker, a space weather expert based at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and chair of the NAS committee responsible for the report.
Our vulnerability is heightened because of the dependence of our infrastructure (water, sewer, hospital and finance) on electricity. The worst recorded space weather event, known as the Carrington event, happened in 1859 and lasted eight days. If it happened again the report says that within 90 seconds it would knock off the power for more than 130 million people.
The shocker is how long they said it would take for the power to come back on:
The NAS puts the recovery time at four to 10 years. It is questionable whether the US would ever bounce back. “I don’t think the NAS report is scaremongering,” says Mike Hapgood, who chairs the European Space Agency’s space weather team. [The head of NASA’s planetary division, James] Green agrees. “Scientists are conservative by nature and this group is really thoughtful,” he says. “This is a fair and balanced report.”
Bad astronomy says, “We’re in no major danger from this event, but wow, that’s cool.” Still, I wonder have we made progress on the grid?
Here’s NASA video: