The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines
daily.jstor.org
daily.jstor.org
EDIT: Sorry, checked Wikipedia:
"Annus Domini (the year of the Lord) 774. This year the Northumbrians banished their king, Alred, from York at Easter-tide; and chose Ethelred, the son of Mull, for their lord, who reigned four winters. This year also appeared in the heavens a red crucifix, after sunset; the Mercians and the men of Kent fought at Otford; and wonderful serpents were seen in the land of the South-Saxons. — Anglo-Saxon Chronicle[9]"
Lights of every imaginable color were issuing from the southern heavens, one color fading away only to give place to another if possible more beautiful than the last, the streams mounting to the zenith, but always becoming a rich purple when reaching there, and always curling round, leaving a clear strip of sky, which may be described as four fingers held at arm's length.
The northern side from the zenith was also illuminated with beautiful colors, always curling round at the zenith, but were considered to be merely a reproduction of the southern display, as all colors south and north always corresponded.
It was a sight never to be forgotten, and was considered at the time to be the greatest aurora recorded [...].
The rationalist and pantheist saw nature in her most exquisite robes, recognising, the divine immanence, immutable law, cause, and effect. The superstitious and the fanatical had dire forebodings, and thought it a foreshadowing of Armageddon and final dissolution.
Maybe it's just survivor bias but: crikey! People could really write back then!
Edit: you probably meant the Carrington event, I am starting my next coffee now.
I'm reading this critical analysis of it (2013):
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292848789_Geometry_...
> The interpretation of individual rock art images and related art forms as local perspectives on a single celestial phenomenon requires a determination of scale, perspective, and temporal evolution. Peratt interpreted dotted circles and concentric circles as bottom-up renditions of a diocotron instability affecting the hollow outer sheets of the z-pinch (Peratt 2003:1209–1210,1212), while he derived ‘ladders’, ‘caterpillars’, ‘birds on sticks’, ‘squattermen’, ‘Kokopelli’, and many other forms from instabilities in the solid inner core of the lower segment of the auroral beam, viewed sideways or at an oblique angle (Peratt 2003:1193–1205). So far, so good— the matches between these respective instabilities and their petroglyphic correlates are indeed compelling. Problems appear when the geographic distribution of such designs is taken into account.
I love this sentence. I am pretty inarticulate in person, sometimes I fantasise myself delivering lines like this in a hastily erected mobile command centre.
"In English, please, professor?" growls a FBI agent. My acolyte pushes their glasses up "uh... uh... if you consider these petroglyphs as a correlate of an instability in the solid inner core of the lower segment of the auroral-" the FBI agent pinches his temples and rounds on the eager young researcher, "You better start making sense, pencil-neck!"
I step gently in between them "In simple terms, we're talking about... a Miyake Event."
https://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/DPP21/Session/JP11.15
> Since cosmic rays are unaffected by the galaxy’s gravity, they increase the buoyancy of the ISM. However, the cosmic ray fluid has a finite compressibility, increasing the energy required to form valleys. Linear theory suggests this compressibility dominates buoyancy, suppressing the instability.
> To address this counterintuitive result, we run local simulations of injections of cosmic ray pressure in the galactic disk. This assumes a supernova as the source. If this physically motivated perturbation creates buoyant magnetic flux tubes, then it is likely the Parker instability can develop in the ISM even if instability criteria from linear theory are not met.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova#Recurrent_nova
https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/bad-astronomy-a-micronova-is-...
Covid was enough to create an international backlog of transformers, and that was with a normal rate of attrition.
Lets say there were a few transformers that did survive.
The parts to make new transformers are manufactured all over the place.
So you would need to transport the 'working' transformers where they are needed to get power back to each plant that manufactures some singular component that goes into a new transformer. AND Transport them, when gas stations in-between are all also without power.
The global supply chain is complicated and spread out. There are many places with single failure points.
-> Don't have link, but isn't there an article titles something like "nobody can make a pencil anymore". Which traces out like a dozen connections for even such a simple thing.
And, don't forget, a lot of power plants need power to be re-started. They don't all have backup gas turbines to get going again.
It’s a rollicking good read. Here it is in pdf form:
I rather wasn’t expecting that.
And, don't forget, a lot of power plants need power to be re-started. They don't all have backup gas turbines to get going again.
Then add in how little food most people have available and you see how modern civilization will end.
Perhaps this is an argument for making rooftop solar with storage compulsory then at least we would be able to keep the lights on. Assuming that the building could be automatically isolated quickly enough of course.
Hard to be certain though, as transformers are more than meets the eye.
Really?
Transformers are very simple electrical machines. The design process is complex but the object itself is made of mild steel for the tank and supporting frameworks, special steel for the core, copper or aluminium for the windings, paper and resin for insulation, and oil for insulation and cooling.
There are a few ancillary components to do with detecting faults and switching taps and sometimes pumps to circulate the oil through radiators.
Apart from the pumps, circulating oil, and tap changer, there are no moving parts.
There are no compulsory electronic components in even the biggest transformers. Apart from improvements in material quality and the design process a power or distribution transformer built now is really not very different from those built a hundred years ago. In fact there are many transformers that were built fifty years ago that are still in service. Occasionally such transformers are repaired rather than replaced when they fail, quite often the original drawings are still available.
When I was a little kid the original tv series of “the transformers” was one of the most popular children’s shows. The theme song sang, in a sort of robotic chorus: “Transformers: more than meets the eye”. I was trying to make a subtle reference to this, as an inside joke to people the exact same age as me (or people who know the Shia LaBeouf movies, if they even use that same lyric?)
I'm much too old for the Transformers TV series, that flew straight past me I'm afraid. I was eight when the original Dr Who series started!
It would be relatively cheap (I've reak ~$500million) to build and store a mostly complete replacement set of transformers.
The difference it would make in a Carrington+ event (or a EMP nuclear attack) is insane. Without them, likely the grid collapses for years, along with distribution, food, etc. Millions die in the years-decades it takes to recover.
With the transformer standby inventory, critical parts of the grid could be restored in hours-days, and full recovery in a few months. The one country that prepared itself with a backup inventory would instantly be the world's superpower for years, likely generations.
Yet, because there is no immediate benefit, only stochastic, there is no political will to even start to get it done. Even a 10% inventory would make a huge difference, but...
Green revolution. The level of food we need requires nitrogen. This is broken down by natural gas into fertilizer and requires immense amount of energy and transportation. When the grid gets knocked out, you're on a countdown till you run out of gas/petrol. If you don't get enough power back up before this happens you're running into a game over situation. Once fuel runs low and food runs out, people will start killing each other in massive amounts to deal with the resource constrained world they live in. Once enough electrical engineers die then the system doesn't come back up.
When animal populations overbreed and/or their feed under-grows, a 10% overpopulation often results in not a 10% shaving of population, but a 90% population crash, because almost every animal goes under the survival budget.
It would very much the same here.
Excellent point about the EEs (and other high-capability engineers, mechanics, technicians required to keep it all running) being in the dying population. Absolutely right - if the critical mass of available experts fails, the system never recovers. Only after society stabilizes, regrows, and re-creates the knowledge; by then, it would be about rebuilding from scratch.
This also has the advantage that it helps your economics during normal operation rather than just during a crisis.
If it's really bad people will tear apart motors from clothes dryers to steal wire if needed... a jank transformer like that would be hung off the primary wires for each individual house and you wouldn't be able to run high power appliances but in a true "grid crippled" emergency people would do whatever they must.
In the immediate term those of us with solar and battery would be able to help our neighbors charge cell phones and the like. We'd also be able to charge EVs for short trips to gather supplies.
If needed people would disassemble machines for making wire and transformers then move them my horse cart or hand-pulled sled to factory buildings with electric power (or enough solar panels) to restart production.
Don't get me wrong - it would be a bad scenario - but it wouldn't destroy civilization.
The bottleneck would most likely be the supply of core steel. Increasing demands for efficiency have pushed core steel manufacturing into a few high tech manufacturers.
Fuel pumps run on electricity, so you need to get them working before you can get any materials, everywhere, or you won't be able to fuel all the ships and trucks necessary to move anything.
Phone lines (and the internet) runs on electricity so you need to get them back up to coordinate everything.
While you are trying to rebuild your transformers most of the food we have in storage will rot. Think you can fix the grid fast enough to prevent all your factory workers leaving to forage?
It's incredibly naive to imagine that this is an easy problem to solve. The amount of stuff that you have subconsciously assumed to make this scenario work is staggering.
Governments will prioritize food and electrical infrastructure, likely banning transport of anything not critical to these two categories. Trucks traveling to transformer plants (and plants converted into switchgear plants) will carry food to the plant if necessary.
I'm not trying to paint a rosy picture... that everything will be OK everywhere. Some areas will manage better than others. Some areas may well turn into riot zones as people fight each other for food. Recovery will initially be spotty and uneven.
But I'm 100% confident it will not be a semi-permanent collapse of civilization. I'm also 100% confident some metro areas (and the farming areas nearest to them) will be back up and operational within 1-2 weeks up to 1-2 months depending on local circumstances.
Transformers are simple devices. The first electrical gear was a janky DIY affair by modern standards. We wouldn't wait 10 years to manufacture modern switchgear... we'd cobble together literally anything to bootstrap electrical power. It would start off as isolated islands with nearby generating capacity and where enough gear was still operating then spread from there. Major cities would be back online first, followed relatively quickly by medium cities. That might mean that only certain parts of those cities have power initially with neighbors having to share fridges as only every other block is repaired.
Small cities, towns, and rural areas would be proper fucked for a while... possibly a year or more. But before a year was up enough power would be restored to manufacturing that many of those people would install solar grid-forming and/or battery systems.
For whatever it is worth we are better positioned now than in the past. More and more people have distributed generating capacity with solar PV and grid-forming systems like Enphase IQ8 can form a microgrid just from solar energy without a battery (at reduced capacity depending on sunlight conditions). Even 10-15 years ago solar was useless without a grid to tie into so a full grid outage would be close to a 100% outage. 10% remaining may not be a large amount but its a lot more than 0 and enough to move your neighbor's fridge/freezer into your garage and keep food cold for the whole neighborhood.
(Disaster resilience is a feature of distributed solar PV, especially with batteries, that is almost never talked about)
Of course, most of the discourse is hand wavy speculation, vs characterization of the existing stock of transformers, like what standards they are built to and the magnitude of an event that would certainly damage them.
If cost is not as important as prompt delivery the manufacturer can often just take an existing design and repeat it.
Nah, it's just transformers and the power grid, that can be fixed pretty quickly - see the response after natural disasters, Ukraine's power grid being directly attacked, etc.
The only limiting factor would be the availability of spare parts and personnel.
In fact, if the "once country" was _China_ (or Taiwan) it could be a civilisation ending event. We've built a house of cards, and while it does have some redundancy it's not all that resilient.
Keep in mind the modern world as it is now hasn't even existed 50 years, it has never really been tested with a truly international disaster.
Let’s see how we handle something real like another world war or global natural disaster.
They also, as a key point, imported a lot during this period. That's something you can't do if everyone else has also collapsed.
If transformers do blow, the big ones at substations and stations... We don't tend do keep spares of those on hand. They're very often made to order, with a multi-week lead time, and that's with a functioning power grid to produce and coordinate them, again.
Even right now, disaster responses? All US mainland utilities are part of a emergency response pact (private, not government run) that obligates each other to send workers and equipment _at cost_ to each other. That's how things get fixed pretty quickly right now, they are depending on the supplies and labor of other utilities that weren't affected by the disaster.
That is far different than if the entire country is down.
If all the power lines on earth went down, I bet communities would connect people with panels to people with batteries, though, somehow or another.
You probably want a battery, though.
That sounds exactly like what happens in the game Satisfactory when your nuclear power plant got clogged and you only find out when it's too late!
Also, the Carrington event has plenty of notice before arrives at Earth. It would be possible to shut down the grid, and maybe disconnect all the transformers. It would require a cold start, but better to shutdown for a day than forever. The problem is that this requires the power companies to practice for a shutdown and cold start.
Then you will probably want have - https://www.howtoinventeverything.com
Amapa state in Brazil got a taste of such disaster scenario, when the local electricity company was privatizated and management decided to eliminate redundancy and cut costs on maintenance to increase profit margins. The main transformer catched fire and no replacement or backup were available and the region endured weeks without power. See https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/12/18/the-crisis-in-...
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9652509
> When CMEs strike the magnetic field of the Earth which provides protection against the fast-moving plasma becomes compressed and results in a varying magnetic field on the ground. This magnetic field variation generates a geoelectric field on the Earth’s surface and leads to Geomagnetically Induced Current flow through man-made technology. This GIC exhibits a very low-frequency quasi-Direct Current (DC) (less than 1 Hz) with amplitudes of 10–15 A and up to 300 A peak current for 1–2 minutes that flows along conductors and technological infrastructure. The power transformers which are connected by transmission lines are the most affected by GIC events. The GIC enters from the neutral ground point of the star-connected (wye) transformer windings and divides equally among the phases. When the GIC flows through the transformer windings, a DC magnetic flux is generated in the core, whose magnitude depends on the GIC flow magnitude. This DC flux is then superimposed on the AC flux in such a way that the asymmetrical saturation takes place in the magnetic cores of the transformers (half-cycle saturation) and increases their reactive power consumptions critically.
> During saturation phenomenon, transformers draw an extremely large asymmetrical exciting distorted current that is rich in even and odd harmonics. These harmonics can trigger the relays improperly, overheating the generators and transformer’s windings and cores, leading to unstable operations of the power system and could result in long-term damage to the system’s components. These effects may turn into catastrophic failures (i.e., permanent damage or blackouts) if they persist for a few minutes. The 1989 geomagnetic storm in North America that lead to severe economic losses is an example of such catastrophic consequence due to the effects of GIC.
One may conclude that if our modern society gets hit with such an event it's likely game over, at least as far as modernity is concerned.
That be as it may - this is the second time in a few days that I experience a severe and disappointing lack of interest in the actual linked text. A downside of the karma/gamification aspect here? Is it getting worse?
I do believe we are in urgent need to have some way of printing all code, including legacy of basically any consumer and industrial program, because were it to hit, even with everyone today surviving and writing in plain text what they know, we'd be lacking decades of software, that most modern day programmers would have very little idea on how to emulate, at least quickly enough.
We would most likely see a very large sunspot(s) days before the event and have 10-15 hours to take action, decoupling transformers etc, but the effects would be massive nonetheless.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2012_solar_storm
https://spaceweatherarchive.com/2023/06/06/how-big-was-carri...
Looks like they happen on average every few thousand years. We really should be looking at how we recover from such an event, and whether we can do things in the design of power grids to minimize damage.
If there were humans living on the Moon or Mars these seem like they could be even more fatal unless they were living underground.
Given how profoundly useful and powerful electronics are, perhaps events like this are why electricity and electronics are not used at large scale by organic life. Have you ever wondered why humans and other life forms are so unaffected by EM that we can subject ourselves to things like MRI scans without even noticeable effects? Maybe there has been selection against anything that is vulnerable to EM because every few thousand years anything else is culled.
That’s why humans are ok with spending some time in an MRI, while microprocessors wouldn’t be.
For all we know the Sun is actually quite friendly to this. Most stars might behave this way more often. If that's true then intelligent life able to harness electricity and all it entails would be very rare. If our Sun did this every, say, 25 years there would never be an industrial/technological civilization here... or at least not a sophisticated one able to build things like spacecraft.
In any case this is something we should be studying a lot more than we are. It is a far more tangible and realistic existential threat than very hypothetical AI apocalypse scenarios.
My memory is not very clear, but I remember it was around 48 hrs.
It sounds like a more immediate problem would be that all aircraft and spacecraft electronic systems would fail permanently? They wouldn't need to worry about the radiation doses.
But it’s not a given that an event of this type would even disrupt electronics not connected to the power grid. Even the longest possible line in an airplane is only on the order of a couple of meters, compared to thousands of kilometers for power and communication lines.
Only hope is that for when it happens it's far enough down the road for technology to have adapted to bring enough resiliency and/or redundancy into the grid such that we are not so completely vulnerable
[1] https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/solar-system/sun/exploration/
[2] https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/phenomena/solar-flares-radio-black...
We 'for profit capitalists' have never completely shut down the entire economy by turning off all the power, hence causing billions and billions of dollars in damages to avoid the end of modern society.
The whole damned point of don't look up is the scientists looked up the entire time, the businesses/governments/citizens at large did not.
In case you didn't pick it up, Don't Look Up is a callout to a recent movie [1]. I imagine that in this context it's more of a comment on the appetite of the population at large to undergo the temporary inconvenience of proactively taking the power-grid, and thus the vulnerable transformers, offline prior to the arrival of the event. We know the scientists will be looking up; it's the convincing of the population at large via a capitalist captured media that's the hard part.
Wikipedia estimates the Carrington was anywhere from -800 to -1750 [2].
[1] "On the probability of occurrence of extreme space weather events", Pete Riley, 2012, doi:10.1029/2011SW000734
Of course, that's all contingent on budgeting, which is why it's important that governments invest and keep investing in infrastructure.
The article somewhat confused the details. To determine the exact year the ring was built (and subsequently year the tree died) scientists look at the growth pattern of the surrounding rings and compare them with a reference data set of ring width of the same tree species in the same (wider) area. This works even if the outer ring is not present. The outer ring is only relevant if we want to determine the exact year a tree had been cut down, which is important for archaeology but not to establish the date of the Miyake event in the first place.
> ... providing definitive evidence that the Vikings beat Columbus to North America.
> ... The researchers speculated that the settlement was built sometime near the end of the first millennium
This was no "speculation", but has already been established as a fact for decades with the excavation of the settlement of L’Anse aux Meadows itself in the early 1960s. Tree ring dating only helped to identify the specific date of the settlement in the already established time frame, because the only fitting Miyake event was that of 992/993. (The article mentions this, but the chain of reasoning is not really accurate.)
The problem with determining the exact date of the settlement without the reference to the Miyake event was that we do not have a reference record for the tree rings at this site, as this requires an uninterrupted record of overlapping trees from the present back to the Viking Age for these particular timber species in the area.
This could perhaps been established with a lot of effort over the years, but with the Miyake events we have indeed a very interesting method to compile reference records even without a complete reference record to the present. However, it still remains uncertain, for example, to which Miyake event a particular piece of wood should be attributed without much context, whether we already know all the Miyake events of the last couple of millennia, and whether another, more local event could have led to a carbon-14 value that could be confused with a global Miyake event.
"Set in a Catholic monastery in the desert of the southwestern United States after a devastating nuclear war, the book spans thousands of years as civilization rebuilds itself. The monks of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz preserve the surviving remnants of man's scientific knowledge until the world is again ready for it."
Why? I suppose because the equipment to capture the data is electrical (or electronic).
But given that a Miyake Event is something that's never been observed, even using non-electrical detectors, I don't see why ordinary optical detectors (e.g. eyes) couldn't capture at least a lot of useful data. And if we can make detectors that work in the environment of the LHC, surely we can make detectors that are screened against a solar storm.
I wonder if an architecture like micro grids per city block running on small fusion or fission reactors 1000 years from now would protect them, however.
... what if one of the Voyager spacecraft is heading in the "right" direction to see something ...
As in, started fires.
In 1859, telegraph lines were the only wiring anywhere in the world.
If it hit today, it would be a colossal disaster. Maybe shutting off electrical power world wide for a few days, if it was anticipated.
Seems like it could require additional police presence, and they'll find it difficult to be effective without radios. We will need to look at centuries-old playbooks for virtually all aspects of life, temporarily. Hoaxes will spread without rapid fact checking.
> Hoaxes will spread without rapid fact checking.
They already do. I think you have found the silver lining: hoaxes will spread a lot slower.
And these have / are already happening, so contingency plans are already there, or should be made. Water supplies have been failing in a lot of places due to droughts, heatwaves, and dwindling supplies. Infrastructure took a big hit when COVID started, in part because some people started hoarding (toilet paper, for some reason), but the bigger one was "just" because people changed their habits a little - buying a little extra (toilet paper), working from home (lunch options), baking their own bread (flour), etc. And the office real estate issue took a hit as well, but I don't think anyone will really miss that.
Besides that, the biggest risk will be other people. We've seen in recent history that it takes only a small disturbance - a natural disaster, a protest gone violent, a football match - for people to stop following the social contract. It's often depicted in zombie survival themed media, people losing their morals quickly for their and their family's survival. And with Covid, it wasn't even survival, it was toilet paper.
India and lots of other countries have a lot of local agriculture and would probably be fine. The US and other countries highly reliant on centralized agricultural production and transportation? Uhoh.
Idk from my understanding of natural disasters, failed states, and others, it seems to me that people continue to form social contracts continuously. It's kinda our whole thing, as a species. People absolubtely can be brutal, but a majority of people just kinda try to keep going, and often do extrodinary things to help people in their community continue.
We will regress much further than the 1940s, we don't have living knowledge of how to keep complex systems working that way, we will need to relearn all of that while in the midst of absolute chaos. The main issue won't be technical but social, when civilisation is collapsing it's pretty hard to maintain order to bootstrap these complex systems with pen and paper...