How Solar Storms Threaten Earth

It was just another day. On July 23, 2012, the Sun fired out one of the biggest plasma clouds ever detected at 3,000 kilometers per second. It missed the earth, but had it occurred just a few days earlier, it could have meant the end of the world as we know it, hence TEOTWAWKI.

You might think a solar flare or coronal mass ejection is just a scientific term for something that happens far away in a remote part of theuniverse and it wouldn’t affect you.

Wrong.

So how could a solar flare or coronal mass ejection  emitted by the sun effect life on Earth?

Over the last several decades solar scientists have begun to realize just how connected the Earth and the sun are via magnetic fields. These magnetic fields act as channels for solar events to stream along, What that does to the Earth’s magnetic field is have a major effect on anything tapping into this electromagnetic spectrum.
Electricity and magnetism are very tightly linked; change one and the other is going to change as well. So any form of magnetic activity is going to produce electric fields and those are going to occur around the Earth. They are a problem in that anything electronic taps into them. An unusual surge in voltage volts in the wrong place and whatever electronics you possess can burn out.

Solar activity has been affecting life on Earth since its origins but it’s only now that we’re tapping into the electromagnetic spectrum that we’re particularly vulnerable to it.

To illustrate the point, you only have to look back to the Carrington Event of September 1, 1859. On that day, the sun released a solar flare that was the equivalent of about 10 billion Hiroshima bombs exploding at the same time. If the Carrington event happened today, the effect would be devastating.

If you stopped people in the street and asked them what worries them, it’s fairly certain they’d talk about terrorism, economic collapse and nuclear war. A solar storm wouldn’t be up there, but  it should be. This is why we prep.

I’d say it’s one of the top five threats that humanity faces at the moment. It’s not as cataclysmic as nuclear fallout but it’s not far off.

To take just one example, but an important one, the way we are supplied with electricity would be crippled. All the lines are linked by transformers, and if you lost say 20 per cent of them, it would have a huge effect. They are very expensive and take months to make and ship to wherever they are needed. The scary thing is that the power companies rarely hold back-ups of these things. Replacement transformers are years in the making, are manufactured overseas and may not be readily available to us.

If you turned off the electricity tomorrow, you wouldn’t be able to power your appliances, it’s possible your vehicles will not operate because gas pumps wouldn’t work – the entire power grid would be fried. It would set us back to the pre-industrial age and would take in the order of years to recover. Congress convened an EMP Commission which found that nine out of ten Americans would die within the one year if our power grid were to collapse.

A solar storm would also not be even-handed in how it hit the Earth. Because of reasons to do with the conductivity of the soil, geomagnetic latitude and the infrastructure of the power grid, North America and Europe would be worst hit, while most of India and China would escape, meaning a huge shift in the balance of world power.

But if all this seems a bit depressing, rest assured that the alarm bells are beginning to ring in Congress thanks to leaders like Congressmen Trent Franks and Roscoe Bartlett. You can go some way to preventing a major solar storm catastrophe. You could make the power infrastructure more robust, you could localize and isolate the damage. There are things we can do to better prepare ourselves, but forecasting will be a major step forward. If we knew a major solar flare was coming in a couple of days there are things we could do, such as shutting down certain parts of the electricity network. It would be inconvenient but a 24-hour power cut is better than a twelve-month power cut.

Having looked into the abyss, I wonder if it keeps any of you up at night?

When you think that we have roughly a 50/50 chance of experiencing such an event in our lifetime, it really does strike home for me. Agree?

Unlike man-made threats, we have no control over the mood of our Sun.

Because you never know when the day before … is the day before. Prepare for Tomorrow!