New Studies Warn of Cataclysmic Solar Superstorms | Hacker News Reader

New Studies Warn of Cataclysmic Solar Superstorms

scientificamerican.com

147 pointshourislate73 comments

Link to the actual journal article[0] (which I don't have time to finish reading this morning), because the writing in this is a little click-baity but not too bad.

I'm curious if there is any serious analysis out there about dangers to the electric grid that exist. It's hard to wade through a google search on the topic and find a good round up of how bad things actually are.

[0] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201...

Here's a more modern event primarily impacting Canada's grid due in-part to the length of their north-south running lines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1989_geomagnetic_storm

Yes events like that, if they happened today would be more impacting - mobile cell towers! Satellites... the potential for disruption is greater.

The story references two recent papers. The other is:

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2019SW00...

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

[Lloyds insurance pdf] Transformers are the fundamental problem. Once they are fried it could take years to get grid back up and running. There was US legislation proposed to mandate spares in the the event of a major solar flare, don't have time to locate right now

I remember a few years back hearing that one reason we are studying the sun is to hopefully detect such a powerful solar storm on the order of ~hours before such a solar flare hits Earth. This might give grid operators enough time to effectively shut off and disconnect those massive transformers to save them from the brunt of the damage.

'... it is a problem the same way hurricanes are a problem. One can protect oneself with advance information and proper precautions. During a hurricane watch, a homeowner can stay put … or he can seal up the house, turn off the electronics and get out of the way. Similarly, scientists at NASA and NOAA give warnings to electric companies, spacecraft operators and airline pilots before a CME comes to Earth so that these groups can take proper precautions'.. https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/news/flare-impac...

The US has something like a supply of 2% replacements for normal repairs. Something much larger than that could mean the end of the US power grid for years. Plus the suply chain to manufacture replacements could be terminally destroyed.

Interestingly, it sounds like most predictions for solar cycle 25 [1] are that it will likely be milder than average, like #24 is/was. Anyone who knows more about this sort of thing care to comment?

It kind of sounds like this article is just saying that a big storm could be harmful if it happens, but the headline seems to imply that a big storm is more likely in the near future.

I do wonder if modern electronics are more prone to failure from this sort of thing, though; the transistors keep getting smaller and more power-efficient, which seems like it would also mean that they require less energy to switch.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cycle_25

My understanding is that it's long conductors that are the problem (telegraph wires etc) that are the most under threat, just unplugging most things would protect them.

So, tangental question. I have read about the Earth's magnetic poles moving in the past. I have also read that the poles are likely to move or start moving again sooner rather than later. Would a large geomagnetic storm influence that? I.e. would it make the poles more likely to shift, or kick them into motion? Would it make the poles less likely to shift or hold them in place? Setting aside the disruption of a major change to the cardinal directions, would a shift of the poles be disruptive to infrastructure like the storms in the article are said to be?

I don't know the answer to your question (though I'm curious too!) but wanted to link this nifty map from NOAA re:pole movements-

https://maps.ngdc.noaa.gov/viewers/historical_declination/

The Earth's magnetic field is created from electrodynamo activity in the liquid iron core of the Earth. A solar super storm would have basically no influence on the millions of cubic kilometers of conducting and convecting iron. After the storm had passed, the magnetic field on the Earth's surface would be unchanged.

As to your last question, when the Earth's field flips direction (polarity reversal) or tries to flip but returns to the original polarity (magnetic excursion), the Earth's magnetic field drops to around 10% of the normal field strength and is no longer dipolar. This would cause many current satellites to be destroyed by the solar wind, but since drops in the field to this level takes hundreds or thousands of years, there is little to worry about.

Aren't modern electrical systems much better protected against solar storms than in 1859 or 1921?

In some countries with modern grids. The grid in the United States (with the exception of most of Texas which is on its own independent grid) however is not and is quite susceptible to this sort of event. Modern hardware that can actually handle this sort of thing is simply largely lacking in the United States as it's far cheaper to repair the occasional failed piece of equipment than to redo the entire grid and the power companies are out to make profits tomorrow not to prepare for "it might happen tomorrow or in 10,000 years" types of events. Even losing a small percentage of the hardware to an event like this could result in blackouts in entire regions and rolling blackouts for quite some time until enough hardware could be replaced.

Worse, a lot of the hardware at that level (those big transformers and the like) are not really kept in surplus and are effectively manufactured to order and sourced outside of the United States. And while that's not a problem for countries that are more modernized, if you took down the grid in the United States the economic and food supply implications would be a global issue.

Similarly, if anything ever happened to GPS the logistics and agricultural industries would topple as they are so incredibly dependent on GPS now it's terrifying.

There have been attempts to modernize it and a plethora of articles exist on the subject, here is a semi-decent one Forbes ran earlier this year

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidblackmon/2019/07/12/modern...

Honestly, reading this makes me nervous - it's scary just how fragile our modern way of life is.

It really is. We've become insanely dependent on the internet, massive electrical grids and GPS.

GPS is especially interesting because the USAF didn't even want it and it almost never happened yet ever shipping company, every cargo ship, every semi, ever FedEx and UPS truck, many pieces of large farm vehicles and most of us use GPS daily. The larger farming operations even use GPS to harvest as GPS is far more accurate than a human being trying to make optimal rows and optimal rows end up in huge time & fuel savings as each acre goes by.

And take the internet... all of those delivery/freight companies use the internet to manage their shipments all across the world and to adjust routes on the fly, and most commerce is conducted via the internet either via websites or servers.

Then power. If you don't have power you don't have water pressure, you can't pump gasoline, you can't make gasoline, you can't use the internet, etc. If you even just manage to take down one region (like happened in Canada in 1989 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1989_geomagnetic_storm ) for even a day you have a massive disruption.

It can honestly be terrifying if you let your mind obsess about it, just how fragile our technological civilization is. More and more I want to live as simply as possible but man, it's hard, we rely so much on gadgets and SAAS and the general convenience of an electricity/GPS/internet driven society.

I'd much prefer if things were more self-contained and self-reliant rather than so deeply interconnected; I don't yearn much for simple (pre-industrial) life. But given the reality we have, it makes it extremely important to protect our civilization from shocks and reinforce the most fragile aspects of it. That's why I often speak up against revolutionary changes, for good or bad. I'm for more gradual changes, and strongly against those that risk breaking civilization, because that would be game over for everyone.

I wholeheartedly agree. Society has it's fair share of flaws (and they absolutely should be fixed!) but all of the alternatives are way worse.

GPS is also used heavily in banking and fiancee for timing purposes, so any storm big enough to jam the network could essentially halt the entire economy for however long the storm lasts. The lucky thing though is that the satellites themselves are hardened against storms, so restoring service would be as "simple" as resynchronizing the entire constellation versus launching a new one

> GPS is also used heavily in banking and fiancee for timing purposes

Fascinating. Is this to measure the lag time between ordering and executing a trade?

I highly recommend James Burke's Connections (the original series if this kind of thing interests you) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ

Depending on how you view some aspects of this modern way, it can also make you hopeful.

Nah, I see nothing hopeful in enormous suffering and death of billions of people, which is what would happen in days following our civilization breaking to pieces.

(And to be clear: I'm not exaggerating when I say billions.)

If by whiskey... :)

Thank you for teaching me a new term. That said, I'm having a hard time seeing its relevance here :).

Well, if by modern way you mean modern healthcare, ease of communication and travel, varied food throughout the year, etc. then I'm certainly for its continued existence. If by modern way you mean the degradation of nature, the plastering with ads of every inch of the world, the addictiveness of facebook, and time spent in company-meetings, then its collapse could not come one second too soon. (Just some random picks to illustrate the analogy, not to be taken too seriously :)

If you could surgically cut out bad slices while retaining the good, I'd be first to support it (e.g. I've written about my stance on advertising elsewhere[0]). It's not something I believe is possible without going about it very carefully, and very piecemeal.

I meant my comment in the context of the comments about fragility of our civilization (e.g. GPS being tied to power grids and agriculture and trade). Severely disrupt the systems that feed and warm us daily could easily topple the entire civilization, and I wanted to highlight that "toppling" here is a synonym for billions of deaths from starvation in a very short time frame, followed by not having a technological civilization for thousands to hundreds of thousands of years.

[0] - http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html

At least our C02 emissions would be reduced.

That's putting cart before the horse. The only reason to care about CO₂ emissions is because they threaten our technological civilization. The planet doesn't care about CO₂.

The Texas transmission grid run by ERCOT is independent of FERC, but not NERC. They still have to answer to the same reliability standards as everyone else in the US.

>They still have to answer to the same reliability standards as everyone else in the US. reply

Right but my intended point was, Texas is generally better off than the rest of the United States as far as their grid because the companies have much tighter, digital, control over the grid and don't have to worry about being tied into their neighbors which not only lets them get back up and running from 'normal' outages much quicker but they can also have a much larger impact when they do upgrades compared to the rest of the United States.

Not 100% true. Being tied off and islanded (well, besides the DC ties) means they have to be a lot more proactive about frequency response and inertia than the Eastern Interconnect which is the biggest machine in the world.

Wonder what the odds are that old critically underspecced transformers can act as impromptu fuses and break apart the gird fast enough to protect some of the bigger units

Possibly. A geomagnetic storm in 1989 wiped out power to Quebec and subsequent improvements were made to prevent another mass outage [0], but that was a relatively small solar flare compared to those in the past, which sparked fires and blew fuses. A storm that can cause arcing like that most certainly result in a lot of damage even on a modern grid.

In 2003 October, a stronger storm than 1989's hit the Earth, resulting in a lot less power outages (presumably the grid was protected better than the past), but resulted in damages to many orbiting satellites. [1]

It's safe to assume that thanks to GOES, SOHO, and other observation and forecasting systems, we'll have enough time to respond to an incoming CME, which would probably result in preemptive blackouts to isolate and reduce the effective capture area of the grid to reduce currents upon impact, but little can be done to protect satellites in orbit, which would be the biggest impact to civilization should a large portion of satellites fail.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1989_geomagnetic_storm#c...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_solar_storms,_2003

I'd suspect that's balanced by a greater dependency on those electrical systems.

Losing 10% of our electronics would probably have a greater impact than losing 50% of the ones in use in the Civil War era.

A first-person survival game (no zombies, just unforgiving nature) called The Long Dark explores this in a way that feels concrete.

There's no electricity, except during aurorae when everything electric glitches.

After playing the survival sandbox version of the game for some time, there was a short electric blackout due to a thunderstorm in real life, in the area where I live. That made me think hard about our dependency on electrical stuff. If the electricity goes over a big area, there's no light, phones last for a short time, then goes the water, radios will be out, food supplies will cease eventually, and so forth and so on. A modern technological society is relatively brittle.

The game studio made a short film called "Elegy" [1]. I think it is quite beautiful in all its melancholy.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZNbUITN-mA

Sure, but not enough. There would still be a substantial number of transformers exploding. As I understand it there aren't nearly enough backups waiting around to replace them

And I'll bet the plants that make those transformers require a stable source of electricity...

The government has plenty of generators for emergency scenarios like that. It's a bootstrap problem, but not an insurmountable one.

DHS Recovery Transformer Program

https://www.dhs.gov/science-and-technology/rec-x

Interesting that DHS has a term for things like this, HILF.

>Various agencies have emphasized, and recent events have demonstrated, the critical nature of power transformers in the face of possible high-impact, low-frequency (HILF) events. HILF events include intentional malicious events (e.g., physical attacks, cyberattacks, coordinated attacks, electromagnetic pulse weapons, and others), natural disasters (e.g., hurricanes, earthquakes, severe geomagnetic disturbances, etc.), and non-intentional or accidental events such as nuclear power plant accidents.

Solar superstorms can create enhanced atmospheric isotopes of carbon 14, beryllium 10 and chlorine 39. High resolution lake sediments and ice cores can discover earlier extreme solar events. Many studies point to 774 AD as the largest know solar storm event. Perhaps additional events in 993 and 660 BC.

This is an interesting read from 2012.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/a-perfect-...

He discusses how they can build in protections but the issue was the technology available in 2012 failed to kick in quickly enough. Is this still the case?

Is there any early warning system that provides an API for this sort of thing? It might be cool to use this for automated shutdown of sensitive equipment and <favourite chat application> notifications.

I've got a scraper pointed at the products at https://www.swpc.noaa.gov that texts me when there's aurora potential. Probably a good data source for something like that as well.

There are some very useful/interesting apps with early warning information built in. For example, AuroraWatch: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/aurorawatch-uk-aurora-alerts/i...

Perhaps closer examination of where they source their data could yield an API or similar?

Yes, there are space probes/satellites that continuously observe solar activity. Then is one at a gravitationally stable orbital point about a million miles closer to the Sun. It would give a few seconds warmings for energy traveling at lightspeed. Maybe an hour for slower energy like ionized hydrogen traveling slower. Enough warning to depower satellites and power grids.

Is it time for Elon Musk to create self driving boring machines to put the electrical grid completely underground? Mostly joking but not entirely.

Buried power lines are definitely a thing. They're common in cities where you don't want a tangle of wires overhead and in more affluent suburbs for the same reason.

They're pretty nice because you rarely lose power in bad weather, the power tends to only go out on nice days when the backhoes are active.

Long distance HV lines are always overhead though. They would require relatively expensive insulation to be run underground.

German here, almost all power lines are underground. Except the super high voltage ones :)

UK as well.

Other than the high voltage backbone links I've pretty much never seen power on an overhead.

I have to suspect they're more common than you think. I just pulled up this random lane in the middle of England and:

https://www.google.com/maps/@51.8095473,-1.3123044,3a,89.9y,...

They look like telephone poles to me.

Then why the high-voltage warning stickers?

Problem with the buried lines is they have to come up somewhere.

Many years ago I worked with my old man doing some plumbing work. We had to replace a toilet that exploded when lightning hit the tree outside the house. Roots were invading the septic tank and offered a path for the electricity to come up to the toilet. The instant boiling of the water caused the toilet to explode. Sort of wish I had a cellphone back then to capture the images.

No one was hurt but could you imagine sitting there snapchatting when that happened ?

Buried lines also have the opposite problem, that they're too insulated. I believe I once read that underground power lines generally have to be about 50% thicker to compensate for the higher temperatures (and resulting increased resistance) that they run at because underground wires can't get rid of excess heat as fast as they would in the open air.

They tricked me with how close "cataclysmic" is to "catastrophic".

What's the best way to prepare for something like this on a personal level?

Welp, don't be on a flight when a solar storm happens.

We'd have at least a few hours' warning. Enough time to land, for sure.

ETOPS flights are regularly flown 3+ hours from a suitable place to land (single-engine flying time). Considering they are up to 370 minutes (about 6 hours) in some extreme cases, I can certainly see this being a problem. If you had a 3h warning at any given moment, there's a strong possibility that some jetliner somewhere in the world is over an ocean and could not land in time.

It could fly low.

If you fly at night would the mass of the earth protect the night side from the storm?

The entire answer would be hard ... but depends on the longevity/intensity of the storm. The 1921 event is said to have lasted for over 24 hours (May 13-15). I'd guess that some effects would be 'spread' to an extent by the magnetosphere. [0]

According to WP the "plasma cloud ... compresses the Earth's magnetic field and thus increases this field at the Earth's surface."[1] I'd guess again that this is probably less of a problem away from the area directly struck by the plasma ... for radar, say ... but radio/sat nav effects might be worldwide. Some SWPC details:'Space Weather Scales': [2]

It'd be very interesting to see this question addressed in some detail.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEqE-g128kk

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_storm

[2] http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/images/NOAAscal...

Is this because of rising CO2 emissions?

Is there a set of stocks which I should be shorting in the moments up to the next carrington event?

Might be tricky to spend the money.

What money ?

Unless you are buying gold or silver and taking possession you and everyone else has nothing.

In a civilisation collapse scenario, vodka is a far more valuable and liquid investment vehicle than gold or silver.

Those traded on exchanges.

But then what? All the information about your stocks and money will be on computers that are inaccessible.

Scientific "Teen Beat" American... This is the worst kind of click-bait sensational journalism I have seen from Scientific American. Honestly, what a pile of scary hokum.

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