Nasa warns solar flares from 'huge space storm' will cause devastation

Britain could face widespread power blackouts and be left without critical communication signals for long periods of time, after the earth is hit by a once-in-a-generation “space storm”, Nasa has warned.

National power grids could overheat and air travel severely disrupted while electronic items, navigation devices and major satellites could stop working after the Sun reaches its maximum power in a few years.

Senior space agency scientists believe the Earth will be hit with unprecedented levels of magnetic energy from solar flares after the Sun wakes “from a deep slumber” sometime around 2013, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.

In a new warning, Nasa said the super storm would hit like “a bolt of lightning” and could cause catastrophic consequences for the world’s health, emergency services and national security unless precautions are taken.

Scientists believe it could damage everything from emergency services’ systems, hospital equipment, banking systems and air traffic control devices, through to “everyday” items such as home computers, iPods and Sat Navs.

Due to humans’ heavy reliance on electronic devices, which are sensitive to magnetic energy, the storm could leave a multi-billion pound damage bill and “potentially devastating” problems for governments.

“We know it is coming but we don’t know how bad it is going to be,” Dr Richard Fisher, the director of Nasa's Heliophysics division, said in an interview with The Daily Telegraph.

“It will disrupt communication devices such as satellites and car navigations, air travel, the banking system, our computers, everything that is electronic. It will cause major problems for the world.

“Large areas will be without electricity power and to repair that damage will be hard as that takes time.”

Dr Fisher added: “Systems will just not work. The flares change the magnetic field on the earth that is rapid and like a lightning bolt. That is the solar affect.”

A “space weather” conference in Washington DC last week, attended by Nasa scientists, policy-makers, researchers and government officials, was told of similar warnings.

While scientists have previously told of the dangers of the storm, Dr Fisher’s comments are the most comprehensive warnings from Nasa to date.

Dr Fisher, 69, said the storm, which will cause the Sun to reach temperatures of more than 10,000 F (5500C), occurred only a few times over a person’s life.

Every 22 years the Sun’s magnetic energy cycle peaks while the number of sun spots – or flares – hits a maximum level every 11 years.

Dr Fisher, a Nasa scientist for 20 years, said these two events would combine in 2013 to produce huge levels of radiation.

He said large swathes of the world could face being without power for several months, although he admitted that was unlikely.

A more likely scenario was that large areas, including northern Europe and Britain which have “fragile” power grids, would be without power and access to electronic devices for hours, possibly even days.

He said preparations were similar to those in a hurricane season, where authorities knew a problem was imminent but did not know how serious it would be.

“I think the issue is now that modern society is so dependant on electronics, mobile phones and satellites, much more so than the last time this occurred,” he said.

“There is a severe economic impact from this. We take it very seriously. The economic impact could be like a large, major hurricane or storm.”

The National Academy of Sciences warned two years ago that power grids, GPS navigation, air travel, financial services and emergency radio communications could “all be knocked out by intense solar activity”.

It warned a powerful solar storm could cause “twenty times more economic damage than Hurricane Katrina”. That storm devastated New Orleans in 2005 and left an estimated damage bill of more than $125bn (£85bn).

Dr Fisher said precautions could be taken including creating back up systems for hospitals and power grids and allow development on satellite “safe modes”.

“If you know that a hazard is coming … and you have time enough to prepare and take precautions, then you can avoid trouble,” he added.

His division, a department of the Science Mission Directorate at Nasa headquarters in Washington DC, which investigates the Sun’s influence on the earth, uses dozens of satellites to study the threat

The government has said it was aware of the threat and “contingency plans were in place” to cope with the fall out from such a storm

These included allowing for certain transformers at the edge of the National Grid to be temporarily switched off and to improve voltage levels throughout the network.

The National Risk Register, established in 2008 to identify different dangers to Britain, also has “comprehensive” plans on how to handle a complete outage of electricity supplies.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/7819201/Nasa-warns-solar-flares-from-huge-space-storm-will-cause-devastation.html

Wonder if the same warnings apply for the US? Wonder is NASA warned the US but that warning was never made public or was kept from the public here (I saw that the link in the original post was from a London newspaper).

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If it's in your pack, but you don't know how to use it...it's useless. So, always test your skills as a form of preparation...Don't wait until your life depends on it. That's a lesson you don't want to learn the hard way.

This topic intrigues me and I did a google search but could not find any similar warning being publicized for the US.

I did find a follow up article in the same newspaper that was published a few days after the initial article.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tomchivers/100008500/nasas-2013-solar-flare-warning-how-much-do-we-need-to-worry/

Nasa's 2013 solar flare warning: how much do we need to worry?

So, do we really need to worry about a huge solar storm burning out the electrical systems of half the world in 2013? Masochists that we are here at the Telegraph, we love to shoot down our own stories, and I was cracking my knuckles for this one. It’s got all the ingredients – white-coated authority, grave warnings of impending doom, exciting sciencey nuclear nemesis in space. NASA! Solar flares! Planes falling out of the sky! Etc.

But I read the piece, and spoke to the reporter, and – while always remembering that I am no more an astrophysicist than I am a black belt in tae kwon do – it sounded pretty solid. Dr Richard Fisher, the director of Nasa’s Heliophysics division, is very clear in the quotes, and our reporter, Andrew Hough, was very careful to check his facts with Dr Fisher before publishing. It sounds like a lot of serious people think that this is a real danger.

Apparently the concern is in 2013, the sun will reach a stage of its cycle when these large events are more likely. This might strike you as a bit strange, as you’ve probably heard (as have I) that the sun has been especially active for the last half-century or so and is expected to die down in the next couple of years – I spoke to Marcus Chown, the physicist and author of We Need to Talk about Kelvin, who said “Solar activity has been abnormally high for the past 50 years, but the extremely feeble start to the latest 11-year cycle suggests this activity is coming to an end and things are going to be quiet on the Sun for quite a few years.” Dr Ruth Bamford, a plasma physicist at the Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory, agrees: “The sun has been particularly quiet for the last few years in a protracted solar minimum. It has just woken up, as it were, and started its usual 11-year cycle a bit later than most.”

So what’s going on? Well, something similar has happened before. In 1859 a huge solar storm burned out telegraph wires across Europe and the United States. Dr Stuart Clark has written a book, The Sun Kings, about when that happened. He says that the “Carrington flare”, as it was known, “smothered two-thirds of the Earth’s skies in a blood-red aurora a night later, and crippled all of global navigation and global communication, such as it was at that time. Compasses span uselessly and the telegraph network went down as phantom electricity surged through the wire.”

The sun had indeed been running at a record high for the latter half of the 20th century, and has now died down to its lowest level for a century. But Dr Clark warns that “average levels of solar activity has fallen does not mean that the Sun is immune from large flares or even giant ones. Low average levels of activity may even promote the giant flares.

“Perhaps like earthquakes, when there are constant flares/tremors the energy is dissipated evenly over long periods of time. But in periods of quiet, that energy can build up and then suddenly be released in a giant event. This remains speculation, however.”

2013 is when the next peak in the sun’s cycle of activity is expected, and while we cannot predict individual flares, Dr Clark says that the largest flares are often shortly after the peak.

Of course, if a proper “Carrington event” happens again, it has the potential to be far more problematic now than in 1859 when electric communication was barely in its infancy. Dr Clark says “There is absolutely no reason to believe that we are heading for solar armageddon in 2013, but sooner or later we should expect there to be another Carrington event and that is what these scientists [at NASA] are trying to prevent. Legislation in the US has just passed Congress to help harden the grid against solar flares.”

So – it’s a real thing, and we should be concerned. But preventive measures can be taken – satellites can be sent offline during big flares, power grids and communication networks can be shielded against electromagnetic radiation and so on. As Dr Bamford says: “The extreme events like the 1859 Carrington Event are 1-in-100-year probabilities, about the same probability as a storm of the level of Katrina hitting New Orleans – and New Orleans did not build their defences to withstand the extreme-but-unlikely magnitude. 100 years isn’t that long.

“But the end of the world it is not. Maybe as disruptive as an ash cloud, but not as protracted I’m sure.” She gives examples of precautions, like a GPS backup system called eLoran, or active mini-magnetosphere shielding for astronauts and satellites that her team have designed.

Of course, if those precautions are taken, and actually work, and no damage is done, then everyone will cry that it was all a big fuss over nothing, like they always do. So the scientists can’t win, really. But that’s just how it is.

interesting follow up article. Thanks for posting it!

We'd never hear about it if NASA did issue the same kind of warning to the US government.

I did a bit more research and found the following article on Fox News:

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/06/10/electronic-armageddon-solar-flares-disaster/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+foxnews/latest+%28Text+-+Latest+Headlines%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

High-energy electric pulses from the sun could surge to Earth and cripple our electrical grid for years, causing billions in damages, government officials and scientists worry.

The House is so concerned that the Energy and Commerce committee voted unanimously 47 to 0 to approve a bill allocating $100 million to protect the energy grid from this rare but potentially devastating occurrence.

The Grid Reliability and Infrastructure Defense Act, or H.R. 5026, aims "to amend the Federal Power Act to protect the bulk-power system and electric infrastructure critical to the defense of the United States against cybersecurity and other threats and vulnerabilities."

It cites electromagnetic pulses from geomagnetic or solar storms as the big threat to our energy distribution grid, and demands "an order directing the Electric Reliability Organization to submit … reliability standards adequate to protect the bulk-power system from any reasonably foreseeable geomagnetic storm event."

Solar storms occur when sunspots on our star erupt and spew out flumes of charged particles that can damage power systems. The sun's activity typically follows an 11-year cycle, and it looks to be coming out of a slump and gearing up for an active period.

"The sun is waking up from a deep slumber, and in the next few years we expect to see much higher levels of solar activity," said Richard Fisher, head of NASA's Heliophysics Division. "At the same time, our technological society has developed an unprecedented sensitivity to solar storms."

Fisher and other experts met Tuesday at the Space Weather Enterprise Forum to discuss the intersection of these two issues, and ways to protect society from nature's wrath.

A major solar storm could cause 20 times more economic damage than Hurricane Katrina, the National Academy of Sciences warned in a 2008 report, "Severe Space Weather Events—Societal and Economic Impacts."

And the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, while pointing out that "these risks are rare, and in some cases have never occurred," is nonetheless very concerned about the reality of geomagnetic events.

It a recently released report, NERC cited recent analysis by Metatech and Storm Analysis Consultants that suggests "the potential extremes of the geomagnetic threat environment may be much greater than previously anticipated. Geomagnetically induced currents on system infrastructure have the potential to result in widespread tripping of key transmission lines and irreversible physical damage to large transformers."

It's the fear of an EMP, specifically a high-altitude pulse caused by a solar event, that has Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD) worried.

“It would cost about $100 million to protect the grid from EMP," he said in a speech at the House. "The consequences of inaction are dire. If our grid is destroyed by EMP, the National Academies warn it would cost us between $1 trillion and $2 trillion in damages and take four to 10 years to recover.”

Next week National Geographic Explorer will air a special on the topic, which warns that the risk also comes from terrorists. In "Electronic Armageddon," Explorer asks the viewer to "picture an instantaneous deathblow to the vital engines that power our society -- delivered by a weapon specifically designed NOT to kill humans, but to kill electronics."

While predicting the odds of a nuclear HEMP attack from terrorist groups are less certain, most experts agree that another source of an EMP, the sun, is imminent,” the show warns.

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If it's in your pack, but you don't know how to use it...it's useless. So, always test your skills as a form of preparation...Don't wait until your life depends on it. That's a lesson you don't want to learn the hard way.

Coming solar storms could be 20 times worse than Katrina

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/yahoocanada/100610/canada/coming_solar_storms_could_be20_times_worse_than_katrina

Remember the electromagnetic pulse or "pinch," featured in "Ocean's 11?" Well imagine that level of disruption and apply it to the entire planet. That's the threat solar storms pose to our increasingly digital world.

According to solar scientists who gathered Tuesday to discuss the danger confronting Earth's satellites and electronics, the Sun is entering a period of increased activity.

"The Sun is waking up from a deep slumber, and in the next few years we expect to see much higher levels of solar activity. At the same time, our technological society has developed an unprecedented sensitivity to solar storms. The intersection of these two issues is what we're getting together to discuss," said Richard Fisher, head of NASA's Heliophysics Division.

Solar storms occur when eruptions from the Sun spew charged particles and radiation in the direction of Earth. But just like Earth's climate, the Sun follows certain long-term patterns. Solar activity usually follows an 11-year cycle, and we are now entering a period of increased activity.

The storms are capable of severely damaging satellites and electrical grids and of disrupting communications and navigation systems by altering the Earth's ionosphere. The harsh radiation could even kill astronauts on the International Space Station.

According to The National Academy of Sciences (NOA), a century-class solar storm could cause twenty times more economic damage than Hurricane Katrina.

Luckily, the damage can be minimized if we know a storm is coming. Satellites can be placed in safe mode and transformers can be deactivated to prevent power surges.

That's why monitoring solar weather is so important. In a world becoming more reliant on technology every day, world leaders can't afford to ignore the threat space weather poses to the planet.

NASA and The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are already taking up the challenge in the United States.

NASA has many spacecrafts monitoring the sun's activity, including the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), which was recently in the news after capturing stunning high-definition images of the Sun.

Our best tool, however, may be a much older spacecraft called the Advanced Composition Explorer. Launched in 1997, the ACE is positioned between the Sun and Earth and detects gusts of solar wind, radiation and Coronal Mass Ejections. It is particularly useful because it gives the Earth as much as 30-minutes warning, giving plenty of time for authorities to institute counter-measures.

Unfortunately, the monitoring devices themselves can be susceptible to the very storms they watch. Ten years ago in July 2000, during the Sun's last period of increased activity, a massive solar flare and CME partially blinded the ACE. The storm was so intense it caused Aurora light shows, usually only seen in the far North, as far south as Texas.

Awareness about the Earth's vulnerability is clearly growing. This is the fourth year running that scientists, politicians, policymakers and the media have come together in Washington, D.C. to discuss space weather. This year the discussions focused on new ways to protect critical infrastructure.

"I believe we're on the threshold of a new era in which space weather can be as influential in our daily lives as ordinary terrestrial weather," said Fisher. "We take this very seriously indeed."

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If it's in your pack, but you don't know how to use it...it's useless. So, always test your skills as a form of preparation...Don't wait until your life depends on it. That's a lesson you don't want to learn the hard way.

First thing I thought when I saw the title of this thread: "What did Britain do to piss off the Sun?".

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Please don't take my avatar to seriously. I'm really not a bible thumping armageddon prophet.