The earth barely missed taking a massive solar punch in the teeth two weeks ago, an “electromagnetic pulse” so big that it could have knocked out power, cars and iPhones throughout the United States.
Two EMP experts told Secrets that the EMP flashed through earth’s typical orbit around the sun about two weeks before the planet got there.[…]
“There had been a near miss about two weeks ago, a Carrington-class coronal mass ejection crossed the orbit of the Earth and basically just missed us,” said Peter Vincent Pry, who served on the Congressional EMP Threat Commission from 2001-2008. He was referring to the 1859 EMP named after astronomer Richard Carrington that melted telegraph lines in Europe and North America.
More background here.
Update: As expected, lots of discussion in the comments. Go read ’em.
“…this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal and the threat of coronal mass ejections became a thing of the past…
The sky is falling …. er …fell ….
I’m not so much in favour of taking a tongue-in-cheek view of this, particularly as Glenn Reynolds is talking about it, and he’s been very good to us all.
Nevertheless, I’d offer that:
1. Considering the abject nonsense that has gone on in respect of American race relations over the past month or 60, we’ve already been catapulted back into the nineteenth century, or maybe even earlier…
2. “One Second After”. Really? Sounds way too much, to me, like, “The Day After Tomorrow.” Which is really sad, actually, as it would cause Earth to warm, as I understand the, er, alternative theory, and away we go again…
3. “And now Congress is taking a hand…” Like that’ll work well.
On the other hand, our friend, cgh, will almost certainly have ‘er back up in running in six days (he’s probably already got it all built in, actually; it’s my view that he only posts here for fun).
The probability of a long term yer-on-yer-own-suka, type of civil crisis is high when you consider a solar EMP and the amount of unshielded digital control systems holding our infrastructure together. If you don’t have a few weeks of storable food,hing equip., eat and water stashed and a radio in a faraday shielded bag you are probably a resident of rainbowunicorn land.
Oh my.It’s now a big surprise that the big nuclear plant called our sun can emit massive amounts of radition that will fry our computors and stop kiddies from texting? Some people have no idea of how fragile life on this stupid little rock of ours really is.But I bet you they think the Zero can save us! With the help of the slut walk.
Oh.And I only missed winning the lottery by six numbers.
Trouble is, as usual, the report was false. There was no “Carrington Class” event. See the “fact check” at
http://www.spaceweather.com/ I wonder where the Washington Examiner got their “facts.”
“melted telegraph wires…” ? – that’s it, i’m not wearing anything metalic no more.
It comes down to risk management. Let’s do a seat-of-the-pants, shall we?
One of these events purportedly occurred in 1859, or over 150 years ago. (One wonders, idly, how they came to this conclusion, lacking radio telescopes, spectrographic analysis tools, or even basic photography, but I digress.) Then, the linked article contains this howlingly funny statement:
“The EMP effect is not rare. One occurred in Canada in 1989,”
Er, one since the original 150 years ago? That classifies as ‘not rare’? If these events were frequent – say, once a decade – shurely someone would have noticed. Let’s be generous, and say they happen every ten years.
How dangerous are they when they happen? According to the article, the original ‘melted telegraph lines in Europe and North America’ but reports from the time, while mentioning that telegraph lines were working without batteries attached – and in some cases, worked better without the batteries than they usually did – did not contain one single mention of ‘melting’. 1859 Solar Storm The major effect seemed to be an enormous Aurora Borealis.
And that was from the big baby – most of the reports of similar events show effects limited to spectacular auroras, and the disruption of telegraph and radio signals.
What about the Quebec incident? From all-knowing Wikipedia:
The variations in the earth’s magnetic field also tripped circuit breakers on Hydro-Québec’s power grid. The utility’s very long transmission lines and the fact that most of Quebec sits on a large rock shield prevented current flowing through the earth, finding a less resistant path along the 735 kV power lines.[8]
The James Bay network went offline in less than 90 seconds, giving Quebec its second massive blackout in 11 months.[9] The power failure lasted 9 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, the UK, Northern Europe and elsewhere implemented programs to reduce the risks associated with geomagnetically induced currents.[8]
So, no lines melted, and it was a combination of very long lines (huge inductors, basically) with little or no natural earthing/grounding protection that caused the problem – a reasonably unique set of circumstances.
So, it seems that these events are, in fact, rare, and that they don’t cause serious damage when they occur, just disruption. Let’s note that the old telegraph cables were not shielded, as most modern cables are, and that fibre optic cables, which carry the lion’s share of backbone traffic these days, are mostly immune to EMP.
How likely are we to be hit by one of these? The sun throws off these “Coronal Mass Ejections” (CME’s) frequently, depending on the rhythm of the solar maximum/minimum, with the number varying from one every five days to about 3 a day. The strength varies as well, from minor ones we don’t even notice, to medium ones which excite greater than usual aurora and may interfere with satellites, to major ones which disrupt radio down here on earth. I couldn’t find anything to say how wide CME’s are, but let’s say they are a hundred times the earth’s diameter by the time they get out to us, or 800,000 miles wide. The earth’s orbit is 293 million miles in circumference. If we include the satellites in geosynch orbit, which are seriously affected by CME’s, the earth’s ‘electrosphere’ is about 52,000 miles wide. So, the CME subtends .27% of the earth’s orbit, while the earth’s e-sphere subtends .01775%. The chance of intersection of any given CME with the earth’s e-sphere is the product of these two, which is approximately 1 in 200 million. Let’s say the sun is throwing off 2 CME’s per day, or 730 per year. That means the chance of being hit by a CME is roughly 1 in 2,500, or about once every 7 years. From the newspaper accounts, that seems to be about right.
How likely are we to hit by a ‘major one’? I couldn’t find stats on the distribution of these, but if we assume that smaller flares outnumber large ones (like waves on a lake or wind in the trees – there’s a lot more 1 ft waves/5 mph breezes than 40 ft waves/100 mph winds) by 10:1, then we get a ‘major event’ every 70 years or so.
Hmm.. a natural phenomenon which has been occurring for millions of years, without any apparent affect on humans, which disrupted our very primitive electric technology in the 1800’s, and which once caused a massive power outage in one of the more poorly engineered electrical grids in North America, but hasn’t done so in the last 25 years, and which is statistically unlikely to happen more than once in a lifetime, is now a fearsome threat that we must deal with RFN!!
Where have I heard this story before?
Well, if any of this is true, and the Lord one day exercises His reserved right to bring down industrial civilization with one blow so man remembers at last that the Lord and not man is God, happy will be those who can respond like Job:
“Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.”
It will help to be able to actually do something that any civilization will always have use for—-grow crops, dig a well, husband animals, build a shelter, set a bone, deliver a child. Woe to those who don’t and have been reaping where others sow all their lives. The president of the Toronto-Dominion Bank may well find out that numbers once stored in a now-inoperable computer by which he laid claim to all the kingdoms of the world can’t actually be eaten. And canned food eventually runs out.
Kate always says that what we need is a good old-fashioned famine, to teach mankind humility and a sense of proportion. This might just do the trick.
Yeah well, yer math has merit….1 in 2500.
The real concern, IMHO, lies elsewhere. A rogue state such as Iran or NORK, with ICBM capability could potentially do much more than mischief with an EMP device. A nuclear blast at high altitude over NA.
To be effective, that altitude exceeds what is usually attainable by manned aircraft…..and the targeting is not needed to be all that precise.
I do not own a portable generator but several associates do. I would term them paranoid but all store their gensets in Faraday cages. The one I get a kick out of, is a large dog cage attached to a ground rod.
Their thinking is an EMP or a CME event is about 1/4 or a 1/10 of weather related grid failures.
Thankfully a whack of our communcations kit is fiber optics. This eliminates a lotta risk….the long lines are in principle attennas.
The USN has spent a whack of money hardening it’s ships…but there is more to do. The problem is even with fiber optics, the sensor arrays are still vulnerable. The advantage is faster data transfer, redundancy, and damage mitigation. New construction involves fiber optics, refitting older units involve removing literally tons of copper wiring.
In time replacement of commercial aircraft with newer units will mitigate but not eliminate the prospect of aircraft falling outa the sky from these EMP threats…..yer car will still stop.
David, if only it were true. Regarding your point 3, Congress or any other political body can do nothing about this. It’s entirely up to the utilities and their capabilities in surge protection. Bluntly what happens is that the flare impacting the earth’s upper atmosphere has intense magnetic fields. This in turn induces DC currents in inductors like power lines or semiconductors, and the larger the antenna, the larger the induced current. This means transmission lines, particularly those oriented north and south. These DC currents are IN ADDITION to the AC currents already in the lines.
Now all transmission systems have surge protection at the transformer stations, but these currents can exceed that level of surge protection depending on the magnitude of the event. Should that happen, we’re talking about some fairly extensive short circuits, leading to outages until the system is restored.
Same thing applies to semi-conductors. Because the antennae are small, the induced DC currents are small. Hence the requirement for surge protection is much less.
As for the rest, KevinB has got the numbers and probabilities pretty much dead on (though I suspect even his low estimates might still be much too high). CMEs happen all the time, but the chance of the earth intersecting one is low, given the small part of the earth’s solar orbit the earth actually occupies at any one time, and the even lower probability that a CME is ejected from or extremely close to the Sun’s equator. As Kevin noted, the event in 1989 was signficant. The Hydro-Quebec system was particularly vulnerable because of its north-south orientation, its extreme length and relatively few ground disconnects between the James Bay complex and Montreal.
They increased the surge protection afterwards, and that’s all she wrote. After the 1989 event, all utilities did some analysis of their surge protection, with particular emphasis on the switching speed of surge protectors redirecting over-current to ground. It was a big issue in the high voltage electricity trade papers for about four years in the early 1990s, and then nothing.
Also as KevinB noted, the vast majority of CMEs are trivial events producing nothing of significance. It’s same thing with the supposed scare over asteroid impacts. The earth gets hit with tens of thousands of meteorites annually. How many of them are actually large enough to hit the ground? Some very tiny fraction of 1%. And how many of those are likely to land anywhere close to places where humans live? Again, some tiny fraction of 1%.
And in the case of asteroids and meteorites, you can thank big brother Jupiter for the protection. Its massive gravity well has been sweeping out the asteroid field for more than 3 billion years, so the incidence goes down over time by some logarithmic function.
Final point to note, all of these things can be detected in advance. The advent of a CME is always preceded by distortion of the Sun’s magnetic field lines. The bigger the distortion the bigger the CME, hence advance warning of the likely size and vector.
Why do we have one big interconnected grid? Seems like a dumb idea.
What has the government power monopoly done for Ontario? Besides generate long-term debt.
Municipalities or neighbourhoods should buy their own generators. Liberal neighbourhoods could buy a windmill! LOL!
after reading KevinB and cgh I called my broker and cancelled my EMP offset credits:-)))
lightening is far bigger concern than a solar flare (EMP)
and Israel has brief case size EMP (localized) generators, Iran should worry a little
FuelCell energy provides generators running off nat gas which would provide distributed generation. Some hospitals are installing them and they will use the existing grid as their backup power source.
Oh goody, Math!
I think Kevin B is only calculating the possibility of a hit in-plane. Solar flares erupt out at all angles not just in the plane Earth is orbiting on. A miss ‘above’ or ‘below’ is just as good as a miss in ‘front’ or ‘behind’, right?
So some trigonometry. One arcminute (60 arcminutes per degree, 60 arcseconds per arcminute) at 93,000,000 miles is 1,581,000miles (tangent of 1 degree) divided by 60 = 26,350 miles. If earths electrosphere is 52,000miles wide that equals four square arc minutes. I am making the electrosphere a square just for ease of calculation. So the ‘target’ area of earth is 4 square arcminutes and a sphere contains “approximately” (as per wikipedia) 148,510,660.498 arcminutes. So if the flare were 1 square arcminute in size it has one chance in 37,127,665 of hitting Earth. If the flare is the same size as earth at 4 square arcminutes it has a 1 in 9,281,916 chance of hitting etc. Kevin B postulates that a CME is 800,000 miles wide, which is 30 arcminutes so 30 squared is 900 arcminutes or a 1 in 165,011 chance.
Now how many flares that have the potential to actually damage the infrastructure? Wikipedia, referencing NASA sources, states there were ten large flares since 2003. Assuming that a large flare is defined as one that could damage the electrical grid that’s one event per year that has a 1 in 165,011 chance.
I’m not worried too much about it. I’m more worried about a deliberate EMP strike by the Norks against the ‘running dog imperialists’ or Iran against ‘the great Shatan’ to our south.
My 25 year old diesel truck won’t be affected by an EMP. The only electronics are in the CD player I added.
And Al in ottawa….just think.The Sun is in a quiet phase.What happens when it ramps up again? Pretty hard to stop a nuclear reaction which is using 40,000 tons a SECOND of material. Good thing the sun is as big as it is,or it may go rogue in 3 billion years,versus 5 billion.
A solar flare could wipe out the communications and electrical grids while frying a wide variety of electronics, quickly sending us back to the 19th Century.
…USA Today.
Sure would stop all that snooping.
Hope it does not happen in the winter though.
Doesn’t matter, justthinkin. Life on earth will entirely disappear about 200 million years from now, long before the Sun drops out of main sequence and becomes a red giant.
Yah, sorry about that NME. It’s the thing the Green slime keep getting hung up on; math is hard.
Al…..going to wiki for science info is like going to Carleton to get a med degree.There is one solar flare per day on the sun.We are just lucky enough to be on the other side of them.Oh wait.Maybe that’s what happened to the poor Martians!And my above was wrong.The sun actually consumes 40,000,000 tons per second in fusion of hydrogen and helium.And we think the A-bomb is bad assed? God help us all when she goes super.
And the best defense against an EMP or X-flare? Good old fashioned vacuumm tubes.
Justthinkin, we’re talking about solar flares with the potential to damage the infrastructure. There is a grading system with X class (also called Carrington class) being the destructive ones. As Kevin B mentioned there are many minor flares every day, major ones are infrequent and X class being very rare, perhaps once a year.
The Carrington event of 1859 caused such bright auroras that night became day. I think that if that had happened in the past 5,500 years that there have been written languages (Chinese, Egyptian and Hebrew) I’m sure that there would be records.
I checked the numbers and the number of arcminutes in a sphere appears to be correct. There are 360 degrees in a circle with 60 arcminutes per degree. So 21600 arcminutes in a circle. Now to find the number in a sphere you have to rotate the circle times. The square of 21,600 is 466,560,000 but there are some duplicates so 418 million arcminutes sounds correct. I am nowhere near skilled enough at the level of math needed to confirm the 418 million as per Wiki, but I double checked my math and it seems solid.
Ooops, should read “number in a sphere you have to rotate the circle (21,600) times”
It can’t become a supernova. It’s not nearly massive enough by a factor of about five.
And it doesn’t fuse helium, only hydrogen. Core temperature and pressure isn’t high enough.
You’re gonna need to put a tape deck in. The apocalypse will suck hard with a soundtrack. I’m thinking a mixtape with lots of CCR…
..er.. *without a soundtrack, rather.
cgh and Al:
Thanks, you’re both right, I completely missed the whole ecliptic thing. Comes from drawing the thing out on paper!
Kevin, doesn’t matter. Those kinds of things always get sorted out in the discussion. You took the lead in starting us down the quantification route. But ain’t numbers wonderful? Even approximations to just an order of magnitude accuracy allow us the benighted public to sort out reasonableness from the hysterical bullsh!t served up by the media on a daily basis.
It’s a method called a Fermi problem. By knowing a few basic facts you can figure out to within an order of magnitude the probability of just about anything. It comes from a famous anecdote about Enrico Fermi observing the Trinity test, scattering a few scraps of paper into the wind and calculating from that roughly the yield of the device. It’s not the number, but it gives you a strong idea of the size of the number.