Gizmodo: What Would Happen if a Massive Solar Storm Hit the Earth?
We all know that major storms can wreak havoc, flooding cities and decimating infrastructure. But there’s an even bigger worry than wind and rain: space weather. If a massive solar storm hit us, our technology would be wiped out. The entire planet could go dark.
“We’re much more reliant on technology these days that is vulnerable to space weather than we were in the past,” said Thomas Berger, director of the Space Weather Prediction Center at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He told Gizmodo, “If we were hit by an extreme event today, it’d be very difficult to respond.”
“Solar storm” is a generic term used to describe a bunch of stuff the Sun hurls our way, including x-rays, charged particles, and magnetized plasma. A massive solar storm hasn’t hit the Earth since the mid-19th century, but space weather scientists are very worried about the possibility of another.
WNU Editor: I always point to the sun as the main reason for climate change (not man-made activity) .... but severe solar storms can have a far more severe impact .... an event that has happened in the past, and will probably happen in the future.
7 comments:
We need to replace something like a score of large transformers to fix this problem. they have money for everything else and they spill oceans of ink over AGW, but they cannot take of this one problem.
It's not just transformers. The fluctuating lines of magnetic flux sweep across utility lines and induce their own voltage. Transformers buck those induced voltages up to higher orders and the result is wild voltage spikes and fluctuations. Anything attached to that grid will see voltages outside of nominal which means it isn't just the large transformers connected that will fry, it will be everything attached to that grid.
It's also important to remember that it won't be the entire planet. Some grids will be more affected than others because of their relative size and where the most magnetic field fluctuation occurs. It is entirely possible that most of the U.S could be wiped out for example while only some of China gets affected.
You are spot on about the cause of climate change to the extent it actually really exists. Right now the top policy goals of the US government are, in this order, 1.) shrinking Israel, 2.)fighting "climate change" that man cannot affect nor can man control, 3.)promoting the homosexual agenda, and 4.)using the military as a giant social engineering laboratory, 5.)stupidly inserting ourselves ever deeper into Ukraine when we should be working to extricate ourselves at pretty much any cost at this point, and 6.)the stupidity does not end there.
If the US wants to survive, let alone thrive, the government and the citizens simply must rearrange their priorities.
Ropestuff,
Without relearning some of what I lost and reading more, I don't know everything I need to know.
At the very the least the larger transformers have something like a 18 month lead time. IMHO we should have them in stock, a dozen or a score. We spent money on everything else in TARP and for all the emergency of the recession we still had a few hundred million left over.
I have read the transformers could be hardened. It makes sense that current
would be induced in the lines. Maybe it could be damped somehow?
It just makes no sense to me that we have been talking about this for 15 years or so and there are things we could do to mitigate it and nothing is done.
Yup, a lot of time sweating this and not doing much. The biggest change would be to install mechanisms to break lines in the event of a severe storm. The longer the conductor the more current will flow. A pipeline between Canada and Mexico can be loaded to a couple hundred amps. Power grids composed of lengths dwarfing that pipeline will have induced currents much more than that short pipeline. The key then is to have breakers open and disconnect the lines from the large transformers and otherwise break up the large grids. No transformer damage if the transformer isn't connected to the grid. Our weakness in the U.S. Is that our grids are MASSIVE. The massive grids are superb for providing redundancy during normal use but it is precisely this massiveness that makes the U.S. More vulnerable than most places on the planet. We have only a few very massive grids which means if we get hit and one grid is affected it will be a very large number of components that will get toasted. The more we can break up those grids with breakers the better.
Btw Mr. WNU editor, all due respect, for every 1 genuine scholarly article from a legitimate institute you can provide that says climate change is not man made but caused by the sun I will provide you with 10 genuine scholarly articles from actual institutions that prove that the sun is not causing climate change or ocean acidification the way humans are. Science denialism stopped being cool right around the time of the whole flat Earth/round Earth debate. As the greenhouse properties of various gasses have been proven beyond any doubt, to imply that we can continue to pump greenhouse gasses without influencing the insulation value of our atmosphere is a dangerous joke. The sun has been in a down cycle for decades and CO2 emissions have been on the rise. Not related. Also if you want to make the case that natural CO2 from volcanoes or wildfires is the real culprit it is important to note that human CO2 emissions have far outstripped natural emissions for a long time, and that isn't based on speculation but on actual measurable concentrations (volcanic CO2 and CO2 from timber fires has an entirely different chemical signature from CO2 produced from hydrocarbons). Do a little research on how thin the atmosphere of this planet really is and look at how many tons of gas we have emitted since the start of the industrial revolution. You clearly have the research abilities.
Just to get the ball rolling, here is an extensive list of accredited organizations who KNOW that humans are contributing to climate change.
http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/
Post a Comment