Nuclear Bombs Can Cause Geomagnetic Storms

spaceweather.com ^ | 07/29/2021 | Dr.Tony Phillips

[Pete from Shawnee Mission]

"They called it “Starfish Prime.” On July 9, 1962, the US military exploded a thermonuclear warhead 250 miles above the Pacific Ocean. What happened next surprised everyone. Witnesses from Hawaii to New Zealand reported auroras dancing overhead, magnificent midnight “rainbow stripes” that tropical sky watchers had never seen before. Radios fell silent, then suddenly became noisy. Burglar alarms sounded as local streetlights in Honolulu went black."

...Snip..."Geomagnetic storms are famous for causing power blackouts. snip... EMPs can do it, too. Lurching magnetic fields cause electrical currents to flow through the ground. Literally, rocks beneath your feet begin to tingle with electricity. These currents, in turn, make their way into grounded electric-power grids, potentially damaging transformers and blacking out power supplies."

The crucial point of Love’s paper is this: Earth is not the same everywhere. In recent years, researchers have been sounding Earth’s crust to determine the 3D electrical properties of our planet. These magnetotelluric surveys reveal huge variations in conductivity from place to place, depending on the mix of underlying rock.
Love has been one of the pioneers in applying this type of Earth data to space weather, predicting how global geomagnetic storms might affect local power lines. Now he and his colleagues are doing the same with EMPs." (full article at the link)

[Openurmind]

Be interesting to find out if being over land is any different with more or less conductivity than being over the sea.

[Openurmind]

I think so too...

[Pete from Shawnee Mission]

Its not discussed in the article or links so I don’t know. I did see a Wikipedia article out there.

[Pete from Shawnee Mission]

Signing off, going out to water the garden!

[pfflier]

Yup, those rigid little SiO2 crystals don’t like their equilibrium disturbed, and there’s a lot of them.

[knarf]

The title;

Nuclear Bombs Can Cause Geomagnetic Storms

.... but if they KILL ya', who cares.

try to keep up

/8^)

[Pete from Shawnee Mission]

Thanks, in this case I was quoting Dr. Tony Phillips who as an academic would probably defer to or focus on the work of another academic. I have no doubt this has been an active scientific discussion for all branches of the service since 1965.

See Post 21. Some General discussions by NASA, USAF, and Government discussions on the subject. (Not specifically about ground conductivity.)

[Harpotoo]

Nukes will cause annihilation so what’s the point?

[Pete from Shawnee Mission]

You and Knarf. See 28.

[Openurmind]

And they are already being compressed, so even just a slight additional compression would be amplified substantially.

[Getready]

Always wondered if those geomagnetic signatures could be determined or left their mark on magnetic tape. Might help in determing where the tape was last.

[LonePalm]

I think most surface naval vessels are hardened to handle an EMP. (Excluding harbor launch ferries, garbage lighters!)

Indeed they are but the TVs on the mess decks, chiefs' quarters and wardroom are toast, not to mention personal mp3 players.

This will piss off the crew as much as anything.

WWG1WGA

Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)

[Candor7]

You may be on to something but the earth’s signatures need to be mapped by satellite that has the instrumental sensitivity, I doubt that tech exists yet.

It would be a great forensic tool.

[Retain Mike]

It is interesting to me that Enola Gay and Boxcar got away from the blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki with no reported circuit failures or vacuum tube damage. The pilots were instructed to 150 degrees from current course and dive to get outside the blast/ air pressure radius.

[Tilted Irish Kilt]

Retain Mike :" .. The pilots were instructed to 150 degrees from current course and dive to get outside the blast/ air pressure radius. "

An interesting factoid !
At 150 degrees, and in a dive, they escaped the pressure blast, and still had the airplane body as a partial shield,
and were still able to continue their flight undamaged.
I'll bet there was a lot of theoretical physics compiled to reach that conclusion.

[markman46]

I think it would have had to be, lots of test launches out of vandenberg, especially in the evening you could see the contrails left from the launch to the west..

[Getready]

Low flying drone with magnetic tape recorder running...picks up ground magnetism (?)with gps location on board drone? Correlate gps with gravity field measurements.
However....someone with a few magnitudes of knowledge greater than me might be able to figure out how to do it.
That newtech oldstyle robber baron org..i.e. Google...maps out street and da’ woild....so maybe task is not that great...

[Retain Mike]

That was the advice given to Paul Tibbets by Oppenheimer. The standard practice for bombers was to continue at the same altitude and in the general direction after the bombs were released. By turning and diving the distance was increased and the speed was accelerated and they got further away.

The bomb had a proximity fuse and was supposed to detonate about 90 feet above the ground. Tibbets squadron dropped practice bombs with a small charge. On one run he was piloting, the fuse malfunctioned and the charge detonated immediately after the practice bomb left the aircraft.

I think my source for that information was The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

[antidemoncrat]

Sorry, I was taking issue with the headline for not calling an EMP an EMP.

[M Kehoe]

Hi Pete.

Not to hijack the thread, but has anyone heard from the pot belly dictator from the Mordor in the north?

Seems like the ronery one up and disappeared.

5.56mm