What would happen if a massive solar storm hit the earth?
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
Personally I'm trying to be prepared for a CME by at least having a food stash for a couple of months, plus all the other necessities. I wish governments would be doing more as well.
What do you guys think? Am I wrong here or is this problem just not being taken serious enough?
I'm probably missing something?
A big CME could be hella destructive and having a backup stash of supplies is a fine idea. That $2T damage estimate doesn't sound crazy if we assume that the heads-up from astronomers gets ignored and real-time distribution management isn't capable of shutting things down in time (both possible AFAIK). But even in that scenario...
> western society will probably collapse
No.
I'm confused how an EMP and a CME differ. Aren't they both magnetic disturbances that affect electronics due to the fact that electromagnetism is one and the same?
Wikipedia indicates[0] that an EMP could generate 50kV/m electric fields lasting ~1μs, a second component similar to lightning lasting ~1s (electric field intensity not listed), and a third, long-term component that lasts hundreds of seconds.
CMEs, it appears, only generate the third, long-lasting type of electric disturbance. According to NASA[1], these have electric fields up to 26V/km, which is a much lower intensity, but for a significantly longer duration.
[someone please check my numbers; they seem wrong but I'm posting them anyway; my guess is misinterpreting electric field potential as actual induced voltage]
To estimate how much power would be dissipated in transmission lines, let's consider a disconnected 1km wire with a DC resistance of 30 milliohms per kilometer (based on [2]) and ignore all other losses. The so-called E1 pulse at 50kV/m would generate a voltage of 50MV across the wire. Let's assume that lasts 200ns. Power is V^2/R, or (50MV)^2/30mohms=83.33petawatts [3].
That sounds enormous, but it's for a short time. Energy is Pt, or 83.33PW200ns=16.7GJ. To find out how much the wire heats up, let's assume a perfectly straight copper conductor 2cm in diameter. That's a volume of 1kmpi(1cm)^2=1.257m^3 or a mass of 2815kg[4]. Taking energy/(specific heat * mass), we get a temperature rise of 15410K[5]. Copper melts at 1357K, so if the math is right that transmission line would be toast. These numbers seem way too large.
An E3-type pulse from a CME lasting 1000 seconds would generate up to 26kV across the length of wire. That's (26kV)^2/30mohms=22.5GW. Over 1000 seconds that generates 22.5terajoules[6]. I'm not even going to bother calculating a temperature rise for that (okay, it's 20.8 million K[7]). Again, this seems several orders of magnitude off.
I've ignored capacitance, inductance, increased resistance with temperature (up to 170milliohms if I used [8] correctly), and no doubt a lot of other things that would significantly affect the current flow, so keep in mind that these numbers are probably way off. I've also ignored heat dissipation to the air, which would mitigate the energy input a bit but also keep the resistance lower. I welcome any corrections.
Assuming these numbers are completely bogus, it seems to me that an EMP would be more damaging to small electronics, while the CME would be more dangerous for transmission infrastructure.
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[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse#...
[1] http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/details.cgi?aid=4189
[2] http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/harting1/
[3] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%2850MV%29^2%2F30mohms
[4] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1km*pi*%281cm%29^2+*+de...
[5] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=16.67GJ+%2F+%28specific...
[6] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%2826kV%29^2%2F30mohms
[7] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%2826kV%29^2%2F30mohms+...
[8] http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electric/restmp.h...
Claims a 1km copper wire with 10mm has a resistance of ~0.2Ohms. But I don't think it's ok to use normal resistance for pulses that last on the order of microseconds. I imagine capacitance and inductance play a very significant role.
And on a much bigger scale distance wise. An EMP would not engulf half the planet in one go.
Google keyword: Faraday's Law of Induction
Kirchoff's Voltage Law (sum of voltages around a loop is zero) breaks when there's a changing magnetic field poking through the loop. The amount it breaks by is V=A*dB/dt where V is "extra" voltage, A is area of the loop, and dB/dt is change in magnetic field with time.
An EMP creates a shockwave of enormous dB/dt. Even loops with small A can induct enough voltage to fry sensitive electronics.
A CME has dB/dT of 5mT/min (linked article). Fridge magnets are ~5mT (wikipedia) so you could make a local field with similar dB/dt by walking very slowly towards your computer while carrying a fridge magnet. Of course, unlike fridge magnet vs computer, CMEs are damaging because A is massive (distribution infrastructure is a big loop) so even though dB/dt is tiny they can fry power lines.
That is, unless real-time distribution management notices voltages starting to go haywire and shuts them down because a CME isn't instantaneous and hard to anticipate like an EMP. Or circuit breakers do their job because voltage / km is relatively small. Or inductive loads (anything with a motor or transformer in the circuit) protect themselves from what essentially looks like just another voltage spike (they happen all the time because every time you shut off a poorly designed inductive load it kicks a high voltage back onto the line). Or TVS diodes do the same for sensitive electronics somehow connected without a transformer...
tl;dr a CME is not like an EMP. Same physics equation but with very different numbers.
I think people don't take is seriously, like many things in our society, because when you look at it closely, you begin to realize our entire society is a house of cards. There are so many places that are vulnerable that even thinking about it becomes overwhelming.
1. http://www.amazon.com/One-Second-After-William-Forstchen/dp/...
Yes, we need watch systems. Luckily we do have them, and they are getting even more precise with time. We got very luck that it didn't strike us sooner.
Also, yes, the entire planet disconnecting for a few days is indeed a tragedy. But not at the dimension you (and the article) are describing.
For those who haven't seen, distribution management is actually pretty cool. Balancing power on the grid is a real-time task and it's not as trivial as you might think. There are three phases of AC, different voltages, and different frequencies (think slightly-different so that they drift with respect to each other...). Generators are potentially out of phase with respect to each other and ramping up/down throughout the day. Loads ramp up/down too, noticeably shift in response to things like TV programs coming on, and change their inductive/resistive profile. This is all managed in super-nifty control centers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX0G9F42puY
These guys already take TV shows and wind forecasts into account during grid planning but a CME is going to throw them for a loop? Doesn't seem likely.
http://i.imgur.com/3QuJjRY.jpg
Because ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutdown_(computing)#/media/Fi...
The clip is from three years ago, though. So there's hope!
Disconnecting for a few days is different from "our major electrical infrastructure will take months to repair."
It depends on if you believe the following (from the article):
Regions with high percentages of at-risk
capacity could experience long-duration
outages extending for several years.
Take a big city like NYC. Without electricity there is no water, no sewage treatment. Within a few days, at-risk people start dying. By the thousands.
And let's say that power can't be restored for years (see quote above). Then what exactly do you do with those people? They can't live in NYC without electricity. Period.
So do you try to move them to refugee camps in the country? Really? Eight million plus people? How do you feed them? How do they get water? And if the problem is happening in NYC it's probably happening all over the country, so it's not like all of the USA's resources can be devoted to just the NYC metro area.
There are farms and houses in the country that have outhouses and have water wells that can be pumped by hand. They have stored food. But that's such a small portion of the country. 90% of the country would have a hard time surviving an extended period without electricity.
Fortunately this is truly a first world problem. There are so many people in other countries that live a day-to-day subsistence life, without electricity. They grow their own food (or trade locally for it), they don't depend on it being delivered every few days to within a few miles of them. Those people will be fine.
As for how to get water to people, you could use trucks to deliver water tanks. You could also have small scale electricity production through solar and wind and mobile electricity generators.
It'd require considerable effort to pull off, but we would have options.
Assuming a perfect world where there's a 12hrs notice and everyone is informed, we unplug all devices and shut down the power grid. We plug them back a day later, whenever we notice the ground current isn't steong anymore. Would we still have a lot of damage?
Things get fixed much faster than you think. The tramway in Hiroshima was running again within a week after the bomb destroyed the whole center, for example. Scientists said that trees would not grow there in 100 years, yet the city ended up looking like a normal city within 30 years after the bomb.
So, "society collapse", meh.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_blackout_of_1977
Because things were working other places.
Example 1: your town catches on fire and every building burns. Everybody leaves your town, or people from other towns bring you supplies.
Example 2: Every town catches on fire and every building burns. There is no where to go. People from other towns are in the same situation.
You run into the bootstrap problem. Everybody needs the resources to get going again, but there will not be enough resources to get everybody going at once. If you don't get the resources to get going quickly you might die of starvation or exposure, so you're willing to fight for them. Who gets the resources?
This one sentence irked me a bit though: "We don’t have a great way of forecasting solar flares, and they hit the Earth too quickly for NOAA to provide airline companies with advance notice (it takes about eight minutes for sunlight to reach us)."
Those are two true statements, but they aren't really related. Regardless of how many light minutes away the sun was, it wouldn't make any difference, because even if we had a satellite right near the sun watching for flares, there would be no way to get a signal back to earth _faster_ than the light.
I'm assuming what the scientist meant was that after any warning signs of a flare, the flare itself comes too quickly to have useful warning. (Which is completely unrelated to the time it takes the light (either from the warning signs or from the flare itself) to reach the Earth.)