Everyday Scientist

Space Storms, 2012, and End of the World?

March 24, 2009 at 4:39 pm | Charles | everyday science, literature, science and the public

A recent article in New Science magazine suggests that a severe solar storm may destroy the electrical infrastructure of the Western World (source).

Apparently from time to time, giant plasma fireballs known as coronal mass ejections escape the sun’s surface on a solar wind.  If one of those ejections should hit the Earth’s magnetic shield, it would cause rapid short-lived changes in the configuration of the Earth’s magnetic field which would induce DC currents in the long wires of modern power grids.  This increased DC current in turn would induce strong magnetic fields that would saturate a transformer’s magnetic core, which would result in a runaway current that would cause the transformer’s wiring to heat up and actually melt.

The problem is that the transformers could not be repaired, but would actually need to be replaced.  A transformer replacement normally takes a well-trained crew with a spare transformer around a week.  Imagine now that all of the transformers in New England, the Midwest, the Federal Corridor, and the Pacific Northwest failed at once.  It could take years (estimated 10 years) to get the electricity grid up and running if these areas went down.  Since our entire water, sewage, healthcare, and product delivery infrastructure relies on electricity, this would be catastrophic.

This sounds like scare-mongering (and maybe it is), but there is precedent.  In 1859, there was a severe solar storm known as the Carrington event.  This seriously disrupted the world’s telegraph network, and magnetometers were driven off the scale.  An event of that scale would be sufficient to shut down the electricity infrastructure.  What’s more, the next time in which severe solar storms might be expected are 2012.

So what (if anything) should or can we do?  Well, with enough warning we’ll be fine.  Power companies would need about 15 minutes warning to decrease their energy loads to levels sufficient to survive a severe solar storm.  We even have a monitoring system in place – the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE).  However, ACE is is operating beyond it’s planned lifespan, has sensors that become saturated in powerful solar flares, and may not be able to detect a Carrington event in time for the power companies to lower their loads.  A newer sensor array might help give enough time.

However, all of this sounds to most people like a bad science fiction movie, so eh.  I figure we’ll never act on this, and we should just all hope it never happens…again.