Researchers identify largest ever solar storm in 14k-year-old tree rings
phys.org
phys.org
https://www.wapa.gov/newsroom/NewsFeatures/2020/Pages/New-ca...
In the future it won’t be “this bridge is good for 1 in 100 year storm” but “this bridge has a 99.99% chance of surviving every storm during its design life.” That will include the very rare events beyond the 100 year horizon.
It's really not that hard to see this isn't a binary choice.
Telegraph operators were able to communicate even though disconnected during the event.
>the Miyake Events (including the newly discovered 14,300-yr-old storm) would have been a staggering entire order-of-magnitude greater in size
and that now 9 of them have been found.
The following links the 2017 Fusa Miyaki-led PNAS paper (complete) concerning 'Large 14C excursion in 5480 BC..."
If the grid collapses in any meaningful way because of a solar storm, we're all f'ed, try rebuilding the grid without a grid. Something tells me this won't happen.
I'm guessing what actually happens is a few breakers trip, the grid is out for a few days and we're back up and running a few days later.
SCADA controlled water pumps never cared what the date was, maybe it ran on the cycle for the wrong day and the backup kicked in, big whoop.
I've always been a sucker for fringe archeology. Looks like Hancock et. Al. were right about an ancient cataclysm around this time, but wrong on the cause.
Space has -many- nasties it has thrown at the Earth. When I was kid and saw the Moon through a telescope, I wondered how the Earth could have escaped that shellacking. It couldn't. (There -was- no 'Earth Impact Database' at the time.)
I wonder if any country has a disaster recovery plan for this kind on event.
The flare itself is fairly fast. But the issue is charged particles that take longer to get us. And they are spread out in time.
As https://www.livescience.com/carrington-event describes, the Carrington Event was a solar flare lasting only 5 minutes. But the magnetic disturbances kept arriving over a week.
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[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Outer_Limits_(1995...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/solar-storms-can-...
That's not the disaster recovery plan itself, it's FEMA instructing a bunch of agencies and departments to make their own. Ordered by Executive Order 13744 signed by President Obama in 2016.
Sometimes the objective rational choice is to do nothing for the mega-disasters and instead just prepare/harden for once-a-century or once-a-millennium event.
Or less dividends. This solar storm is a very extreme example, but we've all witnessed how greed got us very unprepared for a pandemic, climate changed induced weather events, new wars, etc.
Now, there's plenty to be said about the funding side of the equation to improve wealth inequality and/or increase budgets, but that's orthogonal to the spending-side necessary tradeoffs to harden against extremely rare disasters.
In other words, supposing you had the political pull to get more money entirely from the richest 0.01%, 1%, or 5% (and putting aside that not everyone agrees that would be good), that extra money would probably still be better spent on more infrastructure and social programs, not on hardening against extremely rare events.
Planetary GDP is around $85tn annually.
The US military budget on its own is around $1tn.
One-off mitigation costs followed by annual maintenance would barely be a rounding error on that.
They'd have the added benefit of hardening systems against hostile EMP, which is a more likely threat.
If I read you correctly, you're making an argument regarding the marginal effort to increase the budget by Y.
My argument is about the millions of things we could do with Y that would be more beneficial to human flourishing. Even if it's trivial to increase the budget by Y, that doesn't imply that it's trivial to increase the budget by Y enough times to run out of more important things to do.
Q: Are governments prepared to handle a solar storm 10 times as big as the Carrington Event?
A: Probably not, and that's not something we should fault them for or worry about.
Original (longer) argument:
It's possible that hardening against a Carrington-level event is a good use of money, but that's not the original question. The original question is about an event 10 times as big, twice as big as the previously known largest event.
If I understand your assertion, you're asserting that the money could easily be raised with little downside. Maybe it can be. For the sake of argument, I'll grant you that.
But my assertion is that it's not a question of if the money could be raised to harden against a 15k-year solar storm. My assertion is that even if the money were already in hand, hardening against such an extreme event is probably not worth the cost.
Whatever the budget is, it will be finite. Given present technology, whatever that budget is, it won't be sufficient to give all people worldwide a utopian lifestyle while fully funding all promising medical research, etc. Tradeoffs will need to be made. Hardening against a 15k-year event an order of magnitude more powerful than the Carrington event is probably not the best use of finite budget.
If I could start a side gig in a polka band and sell plasma to raise enough money to make my Florida home polar bear proof, that wouldn't have any bearing on the wisdom of polar-bear-proofing a home in Florida. Even assume that cost were the only downside to polar-bear-proofing a home, the availability of the money wouldn't be the problem with the plan. The problem is that the other things I could do with my limited resources would be much more beneficial. Yes, all else being equal, a polar-bear-proof house in Florida is better than a non-bear-proof house in Florida. In the real world, all else is not equal.
There is almost always a trade-off. Some risks aren't worth mitigating, and we're better off accepting them than either worrying ourselves over them or wasting limited resources on unwise mitigations.
My point is that a lack of political will to come up with the funding isn't the biggest obstacle to such extreme measures.
Perfect safety is a bad goal, and worrying that we aren't perfectly safe is unwise.
Edit: if I've missed something and you're talking about some hypothetical world where we've already solved cancer, heart disease, poverty, wealth inequality, climate change, polio, dementia, put basements / tornado shelters in all of the houses and trailer parks in Tornado Alley, figured out why the laundry always contains an odd number of socks, etc. Sure, then if we could scrounge up enough money to harden against a solar storm 10 times as powerful as the Carrington event, then go for it.
The Carrington event in 1859 caused serious damage to telegraphs, for instance.
It's a risk that is more once a century than once a millenium... so we may very possibly see one this century.
Considering how reliant we are on electricity, if everything goes down for more than a couple of days at most there is bound to be extremely serious civil unrest on a global scale: just imagine no access to money and thus not being able to buy food, fuel, etc. and then supply chains shutting down anyway.
... but the specific strength does come into play when discussing the costs of hardening and mitigation.
This event is twice as powerful as the previously known largest event.
This should not surprise us, by the way. I'd expect major solar storms to follow a Zipf's law distribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law
That means that the power is inversely proportional to the frequency. This is common. You see it in word frequency, river length, population sizes of cities, etc.
So over a 15,000 year period, the biggest solar flare should be about 2x as big as the next biggest. And random Miyake events, which we've had 9 of over roughly 50,000 years, should be about 10x as big as a once every 160 year event like the Carrington event probably was.
All very rough, of course. But it may help give some intuition.
Forget about civil unrest. Chain of command in the military goes down and every unit is on it for themselves. Imagine generals not knowing if the President is still alive.
These are specialized machines that require specialized labor and specialized materials from a specialized international supply chain to construct. I'd make the bet that total recovery would be decades.
This has resulted in incredibly high performance designs and incredibly high requirements.
Transformers are the sort of think that are not rocket science to build, but every single detail is very very important. It requires a team of people to design, construct, and validate and all these people need to have the skills from doing it many times before. These people and facilities simply don't exist in large enough numbers because they are very expensive.
There are also supply chain issues to consider - the steel used in transformer magnetic circuits for example is a very specific metallurgy and construction. During COVID it was quite difficult to find. Poor steel means poor efficiency which at the scale of these machines can mean millions of wasted mwh of power over time.
Perhaps the liquid piece is also making things more difficult; I'm sure a dry object is a lot easier to warehouse until needed.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pGH1B863oI&ab_channel=Engin...
He did say damaged HV transformers would be a big deal and repairs would take weeks, but maybe that was an optimistic take. Talking about solar storms and grid damage, the range of possibilities is very large, depending on the storm's intensity and where it hits.
[0] https://www.theblackoutreport.co.uk/2023/06/13/black-start/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event
"telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed, in some cases giving their operators electric shocks. Telegraph pylons threw sparks"
No doubt this historical one is much more significant, but even another 1859 Carrington would be a huge disaster - the lead time and transportation logistics for things like power station transformers can be months especially if now you need 100 of them
The real life precursor of exploding starship screens/consoles
https://www.ecoshock.org/2017/03/emp-instant-blackout.html
The guy's journalistic style is certainly on the alarmist side but the scholarship is pretty solid and unusually expansive.
From the text:
"Because most utilities have not protected their giant transformers, and there are no replacements, the grid would stay down for at least a year, or a decade, or forever. There are ways to protect the system, but a captured Washington regulation system has not pushed for these simple steps.
A hostile power aside, our expert guest tells us an EMP hit is “inevitable” within the time of those living now, because the Sun can also crash our electrical systems world-wide.
A large solar storm, big enough to do it, was seen in 1859. It’s called the Carrington Event. If part of the Sun blows our way, all satellites are knocked out. The wires of our electric system act like antennae, receiving the deadly pulse."
I doubt the doomsayer timetable but the industrial capacity and delivery concern is absolutely valid.
If this actually happened, I think community solar would be choked as it gets ramped up everywhere at once and some neighborhoods would have power centers to go charge lithium ion portable power packs as the overall grids become decentralized. Shelf-stable, non-refrigerated food would become the norm and people would just make do with less electricity. We'd go back to a cash economy and things like night time entertainment that relied on sound systems and electric lights would become almost non-existent. Without street lights, nighttime in general would be dramatically quieter
The real problem would be people who have to use battery powered medical devices who don't have convenient ways to charge.
But yes, huge problem regardless
Seriously though. It wouldn’t be hard to make a dynamo and some incandescent (or carbon arc!) lights with material already available in most metropolises. The bars would get prioritized, hah.
…precisely? Really?
I'm impressed they got it exact, but wasn't by ring-counting (only).
That said, Fukushima ultimately wasn't bad, especially in terms of atmospheric releases / land contamination. It was scary, but nowhere near many of our worst "conventional" industrial disasters, let alone Chernobyl.
verb (vitrifies, vitrifying, vitrified) [with object]
convert (something) into glass or a glasslike substance, typically by exposure to heat: the option of vitrifying nuclear waste presents problems | glazes and paintings on pottery are vitrified by firing in the furnace | (as adjective vitrified) : the use of vitrified clay pipes inside buildings is prohibited.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2022.020...
Its so easy to be the doomsayer, the 'I told ya so' guy etc... It takes much more mental strength to see the forest for the trees - we humans are extremely resilient and adaptable, and even in worst situations there is always tons of natural good in our hearts. And no society didn't collapse during covid, far from it. Some folks simply mistake change with end, I guess reading too much economic news can do that to even best minds.
If current society would collapse, another would pop up instead, walking in the shoes of previous one, even if quite different. With fall of Rome its inhabitants didn't simply vanish into the air in Thanos style.
I would be much more worried about things like search for immortality since folks like Putin would burn this world completely to the ground to get and maintain it. Or properly rogue AI, if we ever achieve that.
It's actually not that difficult to eliminate human greed. There was a movie about an attempt at this back in the 90s, called "12 Monkeys".
You make me feel like I wasn't making it all up. haha!
The Carrington Event followed the magnetic field lines of a previous flare and the particle flux reached Earth much faster than expected.
An EMP is a short-duration high voltage spike; i.e. short-wavelength/high-frequency.
A solar storm acts on a large scale and causes a long-duration high voltage spike; i.e. long wavelength/low-frequency.
So an EMP (i.e. a high altitude nuke) will tend to induce high voltage in small "antennas"; i.e. circuits in an SSD or other transistor electronics like your concern.
Whereas a solar storm will induce high voltage in large antennas; think power lines or long cables. However these days there's enough warning and contingencies to mitigate the worst of these effects; i.e. preemptively shut down vulnerable power systems. The grid "crashing" and needing to do a cold start is still very bad, but far better than also getting damaged.
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Edit: I also want to point out that the above is specific to "on the ground" effects as we're shielded by earth's magnetic field. Satellites still get bombarded directly with heavy radiation/particles, which is much closer to an EMP in terms of acute impact.
It is close-by EMP from nuclear blast that harms electronics.
https://www.energy.gov/ceser/articles/strategic-transformer-...
A large solar storm is unlikely to damage many transformers. Transformers have low impedance, yet solar storms have the biggest impact on high impedance systems (like copper telephone cables, especially when 'on hook').
The only time a power network is high impedance is when it isn't connected (ie. when part of the power network is switched off). Trivial operational changes could be made to ensure that offline parts of a power network are grounded during a solar storm.
Reserve transformers might be a good plan for other reasons - eg. fast recovery after a war on US soil - transformers are usually early targets in war, and hard to defend.
Not if they're more than meets the eye, like, say, robots in disguise.
While transformers themselves may have low impedance, it’s the connectivity and expanse of the grid system that makes them vulnerable during geomagnetic disturbances. The longer the conductive path, the more susceptible the system is to GICs, regardless of the impedance characteristics of individual components like transformers.
An X500-level solar flare would be many times more powerful than the Carrington event and could wreak havoc on our electrical infrastructure. Given our increasing reliance on electricity for everything from communications to transportation, the societal impact would be significant.
Hence, the idea of a Strategic Transformer Reserve isn’t just about preparing for solar storms; it’s a multi-hazard approach that also considers other threats like cyber-attacks, terrorism, or even conventional warfare.
The key question remains: do the potential catastrophic consequences justify the financial and logistical costs of maintaining a transformer reserve? From a risk-assessment standpoint, considering the dire impacts of a severe solar event or other threats, investment in a transformer reserve could be seen as a rational and scientifically justified precaution.
Particularly when the lead time to manufacture such equipment is in the order of years. A grid outage of that duration would be biblically catastrophic: without electricity, we have no water, no gasoline, no communications. We’d survive, but the suffering is not something it seems wise to consider an acceptable cost. Especially at a time of enhanced geopolitical competition, the effect of a storm whose severest effects would likely be localized to the sun-facing hemisphere, seems important not to underestimate.
I think it would be great if, instead of countries merely having arms races, they had preparedness races. I guess for us ape-brained humans, tribalism feels more compelling than a threat you can’t bite the face off.
isn't this something that can be trivially answered with game theory? you just need the cost and the probability.
yes, but such currents are typically measured in milliamps or, during the biggest storms, amps. Most utility scale transformers would be needing DC currents of the order of thousands or tens of thousands of amperes before failure.
Even then, overheat sensors would detect such a condition, and operationally the circuit could be de-energised and connected to earth to protect it.
Also, where there are perhaps thousands of transformers connected to a particular distribution grid, the load from the GIC's is shared amongst them, further reducing impact.
Said that third world countries would fare pretty well though.
Transformers for electrical grids can vary greatly in their specifications depending on a variety of factors, such as location, usage, and existing grid architecture. Customization is often necessary, and hand winding allows for this level of customization to meet specific criteria, including the number of windings, the type of core used, and other design elements.
Copper wire is both flexible and delicate. It needs to be handled carefully to avoid nicks, kinks, or other imperfections that can compromise the transformer’s performance. Human technicians can adapt to the nuances of the material more effectively than machinery in some cases, ensuring that the wire is handled with care throughout the winding process.
Now, let’s talk about resonances. The electric grid can have resonant frequencies due to the combination of inductive, capacitive, and resistive elements. Resonances can cause the system to magnify the effects of incoming disturbances, much like how a tuning fork resonates at its natural frequency. When a geomagnetic storm induces currents in the Earth, those currents generate a magnetic field that interacts with the magnetic fields of transformers and transmission lines. If the frequency of these geomagnetic disturbances happens to match or come close to a resonant frequency of the electrical grid, the amplitude of the induced currents can be significantly magnified.
To be specific, resonances can occur in multiple parts of the system:
1. Transformer windings have their own resonant frequencies, at which the impedance becomes high, leading to larger voltage across the windings for the same amount of GICs.
2. Long transmission lines can have characteristic impedances that interact with the impedances of transformers and other elements to create resonant circuits, thus amplifying the GICs in localized regions.
3. Harmonic resonances can occur when nonlinear elements like transformers generate harmonics that coincide with resonant frequencies in the grid, thereby magnifying the effective GICs.
So, even though individual transformers may be able to handle small DC currents without immediate failure, the presence of resonances and the cumulative effects across a large, interconnected grid make GICs a non-trivial concern.
https://hackaday.com/2017/04/10/lights-out-in-quebec-the-198...
> Within one minute, the cascading failures ...
So the actual problem was that all their power grid was turned off... ie. disconnected... ie. high impedance... ie. the most vulnerable state.
Operational changes could be made so that all 'tripped breakers' lead to at least one or other side of the breaker being grounded rather than left open circuit, which would solve the problem. That only needs to be the case during a solar storm, and electrical power lines are frequently grounded during maintenance for safety anyway.
Where are they made? This sounds a bit like a national security failure. A country as large and world-dominating as the US should be able to manufacture its own electrical distribution infrastructure.