New Scientist Article
- Space Storm Alert: 90 Seconds from Catastrophe
March 23, 2009
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20127001.300-space-storm-alert-90-seconds-from-catastrophe.html?full=true
- It is midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New
Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker,
then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern
half of the US is without power. A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation's infrastructure lies in tatters. The
World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the
same fateful event - a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun. It sounds ridiculous. Surely the sun
couldn't create so profound a disaster on Earth. Yet an extraordinary report funded by NASA and issued by the US National
Academy of Sciences (NAS) in January this year claims it could do just that.
The grids were not built to handle this sort of direct current electricity. The greatest danger is at the step-up and step-down
transformers used to convert power from its transport voltage to domestically useful voltage. The increased DC current creates
strong magnetic fields that saturate a transformer's magnetic core. The result is runaway current in the transformer's copper
wiring, which rapidly heats up and melts. This is exactly what happened in the Canadian province of Quebec in March 1989, and
six million people spent 9 hours without electricity. But things could get much, much worse than that. The most serious space
weather event in history happened in 1859. It is known as the Carrington event, after the British amateur astronomer Richard
Carrington, who was the first to note its cause: "two patches of intensely bright and white light" emanating from a large group of
sunspots. The Carrington event comprised eight days of severe space weather. There were eyewitness accounts of stunning
auroras, even at equatorial latitudes. The world's telegraph networks experienced severe disruptions, and Victorian magnetometers
were driven off the scale.