How Earth avoided the Stone Age–Maybe

Jonn mentioned to me the other day he’s had a number of folks contact him about a story from the Washington Post Capital Weather Gang which discussed how a massive Coronal Mass Ejection narrowly missed the planet in July of 2012:

On July 23, 2012, the sun unleashed two massive clouds of plasma that barely missed a catastrophic encounter with the Earth’s atmosphere. These plasma clouds, known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs), comprised a solar storm thought to be the most powerful in at least 150 years.

“If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces,” physicist Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado tells NASA.

From further down in the article:

A CME double whammy of this potency striking Earth would likely cripple satellite communications and could severely damage the power grid. NASA offers this sobering assessment:

Analysts believe that a direct hit … could cause widespread power blackouts, disabling everything that plugs into a wall socket. Most people wouldn’t even be able to flush their toilet because urban water supplies largely rely on electric pumps.

According to a study by the National Academy of Sciences, the total economic impact could exceed $2 trillion or 20 times greater than the costs of a Hurricane Katrina. Multi-ton transformers damaged by such a storm might take years to repair.

How strong a storm are we talking? They compared it to the first observed CME/solar flare, the Carrington Event of 1859, named for the British astronomer who observed it:

During the Carrington event, the northern lights were seen as far south as Cuba and Hawaii according to historical accounts. The solar eruption “caused global telegraph lines to spark, setting fire to some telegraph offices,” NASA notes.

NASA says the July 2012 storm was particularly intense because a CME had traveled along the same path just days before the July 23 double whammy – clearing the way for maximum effect, like a snowplow.

“This double-CME traveled through a region of space that had been cleared out by yet another CME four days earlier,” NASA says. ” As a result, the storm clouds were not decelerated as much as usual by their transit through the interplanetary medium.”

NASA also has a little more technical writeup for those so inclined. But without getting into the nuts and bolts about the hows, whys, or deep Physics of what would happen should such a CME hit our planet again, let’s consider the implications.

From a normal everyday Joe standpoint, a long-term blackout would be devastating, far beyond the $2T figure quoted in the article. While I didn’t have access to how they came up with that figure, I would have to assume that is only damage to grid transformers, equipment, and electronics. Since I have moved to the land of, “Live Free or Die,” I’ve experienced two “lengthy” power disruptions–once in 2008 after a severe ice storm, and one in 2010 after a winter wind storm. Both resulted in my power being lost for a week, with some customers not restored for double that.

While I was inconvenienced without a stove (electric) or hot water (same) and no way to do laundry, I still had a generator with which to run my well pump, refrigerator, furnace, microwave, and a few lights. Imagine a large urban area or a large swath of the country going without power for MONTHS, perhaps YEARS. It would take at least that long to recover. A large power transformer is not something that is easily or quickly constructed. To replace one typically takes a 12-18 month lead time just to manufacture it. Also, many of those bulk power transformers are not American-made. For example, there’s Hyosung, Mitsubishi, and ABB, to name a few I’ve recently encountered. Transport to the substation or power plant sites is lengthy and difficult, and testing and commissioning takes skilled personnel a good deal of time.

Now let’s focus on the national security/military aspect of such an event. GPS? Useless. SATCOM? Probably down, depending on how “hardened” those communications are. Remember, CME is in many ways like an EMP, which our equipment is designed to handle, but only to a certain point. Logistics would be back to the paper age–no computers. Again, depending on how hardened military electronics are will determine how affected our aircraft, ships, and even basic communications will work during an after a CME event on the scale of the Carrington Event.

Where it comes down to, IMO, is that while our training and SOME of our weaponry will still be superior, in a place like, say, Afghanistan, we’d be knocked back to a technological level on par with that of the enemy. Any tech advantage would be gone, with the inevitable increase in risk to our troops and casualties. Imagine being back to an 1860 Army, with little in the way of 21st Century technology to help take the fight to the enemy and defeat them. And even with superior tactics and training, without a little bit of “whiz-bang”, their superior numbers could be very daunting, indeed.

So, does this mean we should, to paraphrase Gremlins, invest heavily in canned food and shotguns? While it has been estimated that such an event has about a 12 percent chance of hitting us sometime in the next 10 years, at some point you have weighed the risks versus the panic issue. Most utilities are well aware of CME implications, and have procedures in place to down power or deenergize their bulk power transformers entirely in the event of a CME. This would minimize damage. For those who did sustain damage, load could be shed based on supply and demand. Having been stationed on Guam, rolling blackouts were pretty much a way of life for several months after a power plant was taken off line due to a brown tree snake–but that’s a story for another time. Don’t be surprised if it does happen, don’t be surprised if it results in major disruptions, but another, “Oh noes! We’s all gonna die!” event? Meh. Suck it up and recover.

Category: It's science!, Military issues