Electrical Ground Current Event Detected in Norway
spaceweather.com
spaceweather.com
His students launch balloons to the edge of space to conduct research and to carry up trinkets that they sell to fund their missions. If you scroll down on the linked page, you'll see one of the silk roses they sent up on a recent mission.
More details in a discussion from last year:
Netscape 6 was released using the new Gecko engine.
The primary reason for the SPARC emulation is to run an old MPEG-2 bitstream analyzer from the 90's.
Here's another screenshot showing the options available with the tool. You can switch between the picture (shown), macroblock type, macroblock quantization, number of bits per macroblock, motion vectors (shown in the previous screenshot) and coded block pattern.
> About 15 minutes before the disturbance in Norway, the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) near Earth abruptly swung around 180 degrees, and the solar wind density jumped more than 5-fold. Earth may have crossed through a fold in the heliospheric current sheet--a giant, wavy membrane of electrical current rippling through the solar system. Such crossings can cause these kind of effects.
As I recall, the sun is constantly shedding ionized material known as solar wind. This plasma carries the magnetic field from the sun with it. From "above", the magnetic field looks like a giant spiral with the sun at the center.
It sounds like the earth may have moved through a particularly dense spot of the solar wind which interacted strongly with the Earths magnetic field. This would probably also cause unusually strong auroras.
That's about the extent of my knowledge (plus I'm on my phone and it's a bit difficult to get into a lot of detail). I'm sure someone else around here can correct me and/or give more insight.
I am genuinely curious because, anecdotally, my son and I had a difficult night sleeping and a friend said she and her son also had difficulty sleeping that night.
And, today I learned of the existence of the heliospheric current sheet!
http://wso.stanford.edu/gifs/HCS.html
Last I heard, astronomers didn't permit current flow in space. Or, anyway, talking about it.
But I didn't pay enough attention in high school physics, so....
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetically_induced_curr...
Imagine how spooky it would be to be struck by ground current without understanding... Whether or not you survive could depend entirely on what direction you're standing. One direction will mean your feet are at different voltages and current jumps into your nice conductive veins and arteries, all passing right through your heart. The other direction means the front and back of each foot is at different voltages, and you may not even feel it. Hundreds of people just drop dead of heart attacks around you.
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/29/12690402/lightning-strike...
Does voltage density make any sense?
Fun fact, voltage gradient across cell membranes is typically megavolts per meter. At scale that is millivolts per nanometer, but the field strength is the same either way. Membranes are badass.
The potential gradient is the thing that kills you. It can either be created by a lightning strike or by voltage induced into the ground as mentioned here.
> It can either be created by a lightning strike or by voltage induced into the ground as mentioned here.
If 'it' is lethal levels, then I don't think that 'or' is correct.
Ground currents are interesting however they occur, and are novel to many. The remarks were correct about lightning.
We did have a power outage in the middle of Norway at 17.26 CET (UT +1 hour) yesterday: https://www.nidaros.no/trondheim/bakklandet/strombrudd/flere...
Power outages in Norway are very rare. I think it if the first one I have experienced in 10-15 years. Could it be related?
There may be a correlation between the currents and weather/natural events.
> There may be a correlation between the currents and weather/natural events.
Ground currents are caused by the same thing as Auroras, in addition to normal weather. They occur constantly to a small degree. They are a problem everywhere in the world; if you lay out a 100 mile metal wire without taking proper precautions to make it safe electrically it will quickly start creating very dangerous discharges.
Think about it this way. It's very dangerous to fly a kite in a thunderstorm; the line will conduct electricity and makes it much more likely that the massive difference in charge between the air and ground will pick you to flow through. Ground currents are the same situation, except between two bits of ground. Civilized areas of the planet are totally cobwebbed by kite lines connecting these areas. It would be bad.
> The James Bay network went offline in less than 90 seconds, giving Quebec its second massive power outage in 11 months.[10] The power failure lasted nine hours and forced the company to implement various mitigation strategies, including raising the trip level, installing series compensation on ultra high voltage lines and upgrading various monitoring and operational procedures. Other utilities in North America and Northern Europe and elsewhere implemented programs to reduce the risks associated with geomagnetically induced currents (GICs).[9]
I’m totally okay with pure science for science’s sake, but you left me hanging.
Ground current means that there is a potential difference between two points. Over large distances a small current will lead to extremely large voltage differences. Wires over the same distance will have very low voltage differences (since they are low resistance), so the wire will be the same voltage as the place it was last referenced to ground. That may be very different from the ground or people at a different location.
This can be particularly important in improperly wired homes, which can have small voltages on a floating ground. Ground currents will cause that voltage to become much larger.
> The James Bay network went offline in less than 90 seconds, giving Quebec its second massive power outage in 11 months.[10] The power failure lasted nine hours and forced the company to implement various mitigation strategies, including raising the trip level, installing series compensation on ultra high voltage lines and upgrading various monitoring and operational procedures. Other utilities in North America and Northern Europe and elsewhere implemented programs to reduce the risks associated with geomagnetically induced currents (GICs).[9]
The 1989 coronal mass ejection caused lots of problems with radios, which is probably one of the better known side effects of a solar storm. But it also took out power grids because utilities got a phantom current that just showed up out of nowhere on their long cables. This current can also cause problems for other long metal things buried in the ground like oil pipelines.
IIRC a similar event in the 19th century electrocuted a bunch of telegraph operators. They unplugged the power as a safety measure, but the Earth's magnetic field generated so much current in the telegraph cables that they still worked.
True but you are underselling it a bit. Aurora was seen as far south as Colombia and in Colorado it reportedly was bright enough to wake people up because they thought it was day.
It is assumed that had that occurred today it would have fried the power grid on at least a continental scale.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/nasas-parker-solar...
The actual EMF effects, based on both the nature and targeting of the CME, aren't clear until it encounters some electrically-aware monitoring device. Of which most are in Earth orbit.
If countermeasures include such activities as widespread disabling / disconnecting of major grid elements and equipment, you'll want to minimise the false alarms, both on the basis of cost and because of the boy-who-cried-wolf factor.
You can't make a movie out of the latter, so nobody cares.
See, also, why people love sexy non-solutions to problems we don't have (let's colonize Mars), but turn their noses at solving real problems, which affect billions of people (climate change). You can't make a slick film about a superhero convincing people to cutting back on their energy use, and to carpool, or bus to work. It's not sexy.
According to the Wikipedia article, it only gave some electric shocks, not actually killed them.
I don't like being pedantic about language but given that the word is literally just a portmanteau of electricity and execution it's stupid to use it to refer to something other than death. It's not like execution can refer to someone being hurt. The only reason to use it to describe something nonlethal is because you don't realize that execution is part of the word.
Besides, "electrocuted" is a useful word and much less cumbersome than "killed via electrocution". We already have shock, arc, flash and burn for injuries and no other word to clarify lethality.
Electrocution means death by electricity and shock is damage by electricity up to but not including electrocution.
"So there I was at home and I cut through an electrical cable with some scissors."
"And you came to A&E because you got shocked?"
"Well I was shocked, yes. I didn't expect the cable to be live, there was a big bang and all the lights went off"
"OK you've had an electric shock?"
"No I was surprised, I was not electrocuted"
"So why are you here ..?"
(Paranoid partner made me go, though I was certain I was fine. Had some fluid taken from my spine; apparently electric shocks can cause "stuff to break down" and they were gonna use the fluid to confirm whether I'd been hit by electricity or not.)
So I think that ship has sailed, whether you like it or not.
This is also a plea from an actual electrical engineer, because we generally use it to refer to death. It would be nice if everyone else did too because it's useful.
So the ground is not as grounded as we'd like it to be?
The electrical measurement is in 10s of microvolts per meter and was ~10 mV/m. It's hard to translate that to current since the ground impedance can vary, but it's in the milli- or microamps per meter. This is high for this kind of activity, but much lower than the limit the grid can handle.
In the bad old days a storm like this would have been enough to kill. Telegraph operators would have been exposed to kilovolts across their ears on a line 100s of km long. The ground current may a couple milliamps, but that could still cause hundreds of amps to flow.
Original observer's notes: https://spaceweathergallery.com/indiv_upload.php?upload_id=1...
Does this imply that the points a pretty far away from each other to measure an effect from such a large imf? If so, I’m curious as to the equipment that would enable such a measurement. This is A wholly different ball game than measuring ground currents across a pcb.
1) Because its more spectacular there's been discussion of exploding substations and arcing power lines. Which is true.
However a more practical HN topic would be "we all know" that inter building LAN networking should be optical for power isolation reasons, but "we all know" that often you can get away for years with copper network cables over a short enough distance if they're on a similar enough electrical feed. If you live in Florida, world capitol of thunderstorms, the wiring and switch ports won't survive a week, but maybe northern yankees can do copper inter building networking for years between lightning related failures. Anyway, yesterday, if you lost some ethernet switch ports or entire switches connected to 100 meter copper lines over long distances maybe to an outbuilding or up a tower or to the roof for cameras or something, well, you kinda know why now. Of course you probably lose 0.1% per year of hardware anyway under normal conditions so maybe losses were mere coincidence... or was it? There's probably a dollar value to blown ethernet ports related to that storm; can't say if its $10K or $10M worldwide but I'm sure at least SOME money was lost in hardware and lost productivity.
2) Aside from bulk power transport, and wired signalling, a third application of ground current is archaeological / geological resistance surveys.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_resistance_survey
The idea is underground "stuff", perhaps geology layers, perhaps ancient ruins, has varying DC resistance compared to typical background dirt and rock, and we have the technology to measure and map those electrical anomalies and therefore determine things about underground stuff. Cool. When the background electrical and magnetic fields are quiet/constant -ish, anyway.
I've always wanted to participate in one of those, never got the chance. Anyway weird earth currents mean its probably pretty hopeless to try gathering research data during a geomagnetic storm. Yeah I know the 4-wire technique is supposed to help and differential measurements and all that, but the gear is designed for normal conditions not crazy storms so there seems no way you're gonna get good data during a severe storm.
I mean, even the most obvious non-ground measurement problem is even differential GPS is going to get annoyed at massive ionospheric disturbances so you're going to have time/location noise in the data, if nothing else. I wonder how bad the geomagnetic weather has to be to keep construction civil engineering surveyors home for the day, probably pretty bad indeed, but I bet a lot less and a lot more likely to happen than it takes to "short out substations" and vaporize high voltage lines or whatever doomsayer stuff.
Aside from DC resistance measurements, I know the same people do magnetic surveys and likewise having a huge geomagnetic storm as a noise source would seem likely to degrade the gathered data.
[1] https://www.ndr.de/fernsehen/sendungen/hamburg_journal_1800/...
That is the cause!1!!
:-)