Posted on 10/14/2009 8:32:04 PM PDT by TaraP
Natural fluctuations in the sun's atmosphere could cause it to fire a giant plasma ball at Earth, shutting down the planet's electric grids and leading to widespread social collapse, according to a report from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS).
Funded by NASA, the report draws attention to naturally occurring events known as coronal mass ejections (CME), in which a ball of plasma -- the charged, high-energy particles that comprise stars -- is fired from the sun. If such a ball strikes the Earth, it could produce rapid changes in the planet's magnetic field, leading to a surge of direct current in the long-range power lines that carry electricity through modern power grids.
Modern power grids are designed to carry electricity at extremely high voltage, making them especially susceptible to this kind of magnetic disruption. What they are not designed to do, however, is carry direct current. Transformers are particularly vulnerable, and sudden influx of direct current could cause the wiring inside the devices to melt. The NAS report estimates that within 90 seconds of a plasma ball hitting the Earth's magnetic field, power would be knocked out to 130 million people in the United States alone. The same effect is likely throughout the world.
A really large storm could be a planetary disaster," said power industry analyst John Kappenman.
In the First World, where everything from transportation to food and water distribution depends on electricity, this could create a humanitarian catastrophe.
"It's just the opposite of how we usually think of natural disasters," Kappenman said. "Usually the less developed regions of the world are most vulnerable, not the highly sophisticated technological regions."
According to the report, potable water would be one of the first losses in the event of such a disaster. Because water pumping relies on electricity, people would have access to tap water only for about half a day, until the amount already in the system ran out. High-rises, which rely on water being pumped to upper floors, would lose water immediately.
All electric-powered transport would stop at once, and automobiles could only run until they ran out of gas, since the pumps at gas stations also rely on electricity. This would quickly cause the shelves at stores to run bare, since the modern "just-in-time" delivery method relies on restocking shelves as they run out, with minimal storage inside shops themselves.
Backup generators at places like hospitals could only run until they ran out of fuel. According to the report, this translates into 72 hours of minimal care for only the most vulnerable patients. The absence of refrigeration would cause food and many prescription drugs to quickly spoil.
The NAS report notes that a technological meltdown on this scale might be impossible to undo. Pumping natural gas or oil requires electricity, and modern transport networks are required to keep coal plants supplied. Nuclear power plants automatically shut down if the power grid fails, and cannot be turned back on until the grid is back to normal. Very few spare transformers exist, meaning that new ones would need to be manufactured to replace most of the burned-out ones. Again, the lack of industrial infrastructure would make this a major challenge.
"We're moving closer and closer to the edge of a possible disaster," said Daniel Baker, chair of the committee that produced the report.
Although the scenario may sound fantastic and unlikely, scientists warn that there have been precedents. In 1859, a CME known as the Carrington event produced auroras as far south as the equator and caused severe disruptions to the world's telegraph systems. In 1989, a direct current overload in the power grid cut off electricity to 6 million people in Quebec province, Canada. And in 2006, a fluctuation in a small part of Germany's power grid caused a cascading power failure through the wider European grid.
Yep.
Al Gore will find some way to make a profit off of this.
Hogwash! Reliable sources say it was a squirrel who chewed thru one of the telegraph lines in New York.........
Now we know who wears the pants in that family.
Major downer. A very bleak movie. It left me feeling like I did when I went to the planetarium as a kid and heard that the sun would eventually die out and leave earth lifeless. But I guess they really wanted all those scenes of mass destruction and couldn’t think of any way Nick Cage would survive the cataclysm.
Nothing apocalyptic.
http://www.meteorologynews.com/2009/10/12/hole-punch-cloud-not-ufo-spotted-over-moscow/
Probably not but there doesn't seem to be any viable explanation how these "holes" or donuts form. Gotta wonder if there isn't something hitting our atmosphere, maybe from outside our solar system even. I don't guess we even know for sure our very own benevolent sun couldn't somehow be shooting directed particles of some kind at us occasionally. Truly interesting phenomenon in any case.
All we need to do to counter this threat is to have canisters of sun screen mounted on all our orbiting satellites.
When the sun starts spitting at us, the sun screen gets released. Problem solved.
And, it can be the cheap sun screen. No need for the water proof stuff. It doesn’t rain often enough in space to justify the extra expense.
I think if you had the fuel and resources, you can start up power generation real fast in local areas if you had a diesel or gas generator but it would take a while to repair the grid. I think each electrical utilities would have to “island” their repair efforts to their areas like Duquesne Light would concern themselves with Western PA and so on. Texas is it’s own grid, IIRC, they are 23 degrees out of phase with the national grid. Your car and radio should still work but again, unless the gas station has a generator, you’d be using a 12 volt pump or a hand pump to get gas.
But this isn’t a question of ME being dependent on electricity to do my job, or of YOU being dependent on electricity to cook your dinner. The claim is that human civilization depends on electricity.
If that claim is true - and for some pockets of humanity it may very well be, as we discover with every blackout - then “civilization” is hardly a fitting term for such cultures. But civilization existed before electricity. And if plasma balls from the sun wipe out electricity, civilization will exist without it.
Oh, maybe not in New Orleans or Detroit. But those cultures have only the thinnest veneer hiding their barbarianism anyway. Turn out the lights and that veneer is stripped away. Then you’ll see horrors galore.
The Fire Next Time
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