An upcoming cycle of stormy solar activity risks causing damage to electrical transformers and threatening vulnerable energy infrastructure around the globe, a report by an insurance group says. The sun follows a predictable 11 year activity cycle, with the next period of stormy activity expected to begin in 2012-13. The report by German insurance group Allianz said a high impact solar storm, not easily predicted due to its recorded rarity, could cause blackouts and economic losses of over $1 trillion and that the worst case scenario would be even worse. "What we're coming into at the moment is the bad (space) weather period," Jim Wild of Britain's Lancaster University, an expert in solar plasma physics, told Reuters. A large explosion on the surface of the sun could release billions of tonnes of superheated magnetically charged gas at a speed of a million miles per hour, and when that gas hits the earth's magnetic field, it can trigger a big solar storm. The severity of a potential disruption has made experts at insurance and national security institutions take notice. "When you start to imagine not having electricity in a sizeable fraction of a country or a continent for weeks or even months ... it's serious business," Wild said. Small lead time The difficulty lies in predicting how often serious solar type events occur. The small lead time given by satellites is also a problem for preventing solar storm damage, as currently no satellite is close enough to the sun to give more than an hour's warning, Wild said. Updating the satellites to give the earth more preparation time would cost around $1 billion, he added. Space weather is a relatively new area of study, with sophisticated observations going back only 50 years and lacking an international coordinated tracking system such as that found with normal meteorological weather. "We have very little on a solar time scale," Wild said. The most damaging storm in recent memory was a 1989 outage in Quebec, Canada, which affected six million people. The first scientific recording of a large solar storm was made in 1859 by English astronomer Richard Carrington, who observed a white light explosion on the surface of the sun. Wild said: "what they didn't know back then was why about two or three days later you could see the northern lights over Cuba and all of the telegraph system was disrupted by geomagnetic activity." According to the Allianz report, an event on the same scale today would cause extensive damage to electrical infrastructure Source:- http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/stor...torms-could-cause-up-to-1t-in-economic-losses
I haven't even bothered to read all the above because I know too much about this already. There are recorded solar events that occurred in the last 150 years that if repeated today would end modern civilization as we know it. People do not realise that the only reason we can support 7 billion people on this planet is technology, without it there would have been a self regulating Malthusian Catastrophe already that would have decimated the population. One really big solar event would wipe out the power grid just about everywhere specifically it would destroy transformers in sub stations and at the power stations, there are no spares for these things and they take a long time to manufacture, if the grid was not shut down in time we would lose them, if we lose them we lose electricity not for days not for months but for years because that is how long it would take to make new ones. No electricity = no technology = end of the world as we know it. Not a pretty picture, billions would quite simply die.
If you were really clever Dom you might just be able to rig up a way to power your Microwave off the solar storm itself then you could make your popcorn while the show was on. It would be quite a show at that as you would have aurora everywhere on the planet as soon as the twilight had begun.
Been to the North Cape on a couple of occasions, and that 24/7 sun did get on my nerves, as couldn't get a wink of sleep for ages, knowing that it was daylight outside...
I would love to see the Aurora, really would love to see it one day. My daughters mum Shona lives in Orkney, they used to live in central Scotland then moved to England about 10 years back then when Gemma left home a few years ago Shona moved to Orkney but I have never visited, I should though as I know I would utterly fall in love with the night sky up there, clean clear naked eye views of the Milky Way, only ever really experienced that on the Scottish Islands when I was a young man in the 70's and when I was in Argyll in the late 80's
I want to take Jet up North, so we can both watch the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights. I showed her some pictures from the Internet and she is king of scared by it all... She says.. Ongoh...
I gotta try this sometime. Short Aurora timelapse sequence in the middle of this one, it's a flight and the flight timelapse alone is fun http://mashable.com/2011/04/08/timelapse-aurora-borealis/ And check out this guys site, he is one of the all time Aurora gods of photography. http://www.infocusimagery.com/ His Video gallery is stunning here is an example of his video stuff, if it does not play properly click the play button again once you get to his site, I had a little trouble with it for some reason. http://photos.infocusimagery.com/p140051392/h8823da9#h1d2377d5
