This
is at least a threat that we can be legitimately concerned about. It
is real and there is a good one chance in ten we will be unpleasantly
inconvenienced. Yet there is plenty of good news inasmuch as our
infrastructure is been re-engineered at an accelerating clip and
becoming progressively more secure. We were seriously vulnerable
during the last half of the twentieth century, but that is I believe
in decline for a number of good reasons, not least steady the
replacement of copper in our telecommunications.
Thus
while the threat is real it is also diminishing as a combination of
simple awareness and technology replacement is doing its magic.
I
still would like to see a general mandate implemented that insists
manufacturers design in protection at source. This would mostly
complete the job inside two generations and would secure most
everything inside one. In my mind, there is simply no serious need
to be vulnerable at all. It is no different than placing a spillway
on a dam.
In
the meantime engineering staffs have all had plenty of warning and
time to do what is practical to protect their charges.
World On Alert For
Massive Solar Storm
Sunday 05 August 2012
Experts say the sun is
reaching a peak in its 10-year activity cycle, putting the Earth at
greater risk from solar storms.
Power grids,
communications and satellites could be knocked out by a massive solar
storm in the next two years, scientists warn.
Experts say the sun is
reaching a peak in its 10-year activity cycle, putting the Earth at
greater risk from solar storms.
Mike Hapgood, a space
weather specialist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Didcot,
Oxfordshire, said: "Governments are taking it very seriously.
These things may be very rare but when they happen, the consequences
can be catastrophic."
He warned that solar
storms are increasingly being put on national risk registers used for
disaster planning, alongside other events like tsunamis and volcanic
eruptions.
There is 12% chance of
a major solar storm every decade - making them a roughly
one-in-100-year event. The last major storm was more than 150 years
ago.
The threat comes from
magnetically-charged plasma thrown out by the sun in coronal mass
ejections.
Like vast bubbles
bursting off the sun's surface, they send millions of tons of gas
racing through space that can engulf the Earth with as little as one
day's warning.
They trigger
geomagnetic storms which can literally melt expensive transformers in
national power grids.
Satellites can be
damaged or destroyed and radio communications - including with jet
airliners - could be knocked out.
Teams of scientists in
North America and Europe monitor the sun and issue warnings to
governments, power companies and airline operators.
In 1989, a solar storm
was blamed for taking out the entire power network in Quebec, Canada,
which left millions without electricity for nine hours.
The largest was known
as the Carrington event in 1859, when British astronomer Richard
Carrington observed a large solar eruption that took just 17 hours to
reach the Earth's atmosphere.
It caused the aurora
borealis - or Northern Lights - to be seen as far south as the
Caribbean.
1 comment:
I am concerned for arclein's complacency, in view of, say, Matt Stein's warming on the likelihood of these solar occurrences.
Ed Lawrence
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