12% Chance Earth Will Be Hit By Devastating Solar Superstorm

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Here is a somewhat less hysterical version by the BBC reporting on a Royal Academy of Engineering report assessing the threat to the UK. Make no mista ke a Carrington event today would take a lot of continental US power system s down and the lead time for making replacement big power transformers is l ong...

Direct to the technical report:

Most obvious effect would be powergrids close to the poles overloaded and t ripped out and GPS rendered useless for days, weeks or months depending on the severity of the disturbance and damage inflicted on satellites. UK civi lian mobile phones are likely to be resilient but Tetra will fall flat on i ts face.

The odds quoted by the OP were "in the next decade". As a Bayesian and know ing that the last superstorm to hit the Earth was ~150 years ago I would pu t the odds in any one year at ~0.66% and in a decade about 6.4% or about ha lf.

This ignores the ones that completely miss us. The one reported above was a ctually in 2012 and a near miss but fortunately the Earth is a small target . The last one to do real damage took down part of Canada power grid in 198

2. Regards, Martin Brown

Posting via Google gropes as Teranews is borked :(

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l Academy of Engineering report assessing the threat to the UK. Make no mis take a Carrington event today would take a lot of continental US power syst ems down and the lead time for making replacement big power transformers is long...

my understanding is that the mechanism of damage is via a DC offset that is created and the large transformer cores saturate due to the DC offset and this causes a failure.

If this is the true mechanism, it seems it should not be that difficult to provide protection.,

Mark

_Report_Final.PDF

tripped out and GPS rendered useless for days, weeks or months depending o n the severity of the disturbance and damage inflicted on satellites. UK ci vilian mobile phones are likely to be resilient but Tetra will fall flat on its face.

owing that the last superstorm to hit the Earth was ~150 years ago I would put the odds in any one year at ~0.66% and in a decade about 6.4% or about half.

actually in 2012 and a near miss but fortunately the Earth is a small targ et. The last one to do real damage took down part of Canada power grid in 1

Have you ever tried to shield against a rapidly varying magnetic field?

It can be done small scale but it is nigh on impossible in bulk.

By comparison you can get nearly perfect Faraday cage shielding of electricity and RF radiation. You can even do pretty well against EMP. The humble metal biscuit tin would save a radio at a pinch.

Incidentally I saw a nice display by our local version of the US Telsa coil guys Arc Attack last week. Men in chain mail who style themselves as Lords of Lightning. They are red and blue on top of 2MV Tesla coils.

If Faraday shielding didn't work 100% they would be toast. Interesting to wonder how hot the big arcs point of contact gets. I presume that is why they use a lance for the most fat and juicy close contact sparks...

The videos don't do justice to the phenomenal noise that these big sparks make at a live performance. I was in the front row...

Regards, Martin Brown

In my understanding, this seemed to be the case in Canada in 1989.

One contributing factor was that they used a lot autotransformers in a wye connection with the neutral point grounded at each site.

With huge currents flowing within the ground during solar events, there will be potential differences between grounded sites. The phase connectors conduct much better than the soil beneath them, so quite large currents could flow.

An ungrounded delta system should not suffer from this kinds of problems.