|
Post by papaof2 on Nov 25, 2023 7:23:09 GMT -6
www.nooutage.com/2012.htmMassive Solar Superstorm barely missed blasting the earth back to the dark ages On July 23, 2012, we had no idea how close we were to a massive blackout caused by a huge magnetic superstorm from the Sun. The storm was caused by a rapid succession of coronal mass ejections, intense eruptions from the surface of the Sun, which hurtled out into space through the Earth’s orbit. If it had happened just nine days earlier, our world would have been hit, wreaking havoc with the electrical grid, knocking out satellites and GPS and costing economies billions of dollars.A team has now analyzed the magnetic storm, which was detected by NASA’s STEREO A spacecraft and published their results in Nature Communications. “Had [the latest storm] hit Earth, it probably would have been like the big one in 1859, but the effect today, with our modern technologies, would have been tremendous,” said Janet Luhmann, who is part of the STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Observatory) team and based at UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory. That 1859 big one, referred to as the Carrington Event, is the most severe solar storm ever recorded on the planet. At the time the only electric lines were telegraphs. And the induced voltages caused the lines to fail and start fires. "People keep saying that these are rare natural hazards, but they are happening in the Solar System even though we don’t always see them.” A small magnetic event in 1989 collapsed Canada’s Hydro-Quebec power grid and led to six million people going without electricity. The cost of an extreme space weather event, if it hits Earth, could reach trillions of dollars with a potential recovery time of 4-10 years.” A study last year estimated that a second Carrington event could cost the world $2.6 trillion.
|
|