4 ms·

As I said over in the hackaday thread, many people both there are here are having trouble confusing the geomagnetic storms from flare ionizing light, geomagneti

As I said over in the hackaday thread, many people both there are here are having trouble confusing the geomagnetic storms from flare ionizing light, geomagnetic storms from coronal mass ejections, and EMP from fast nuclear fission xrays interacting with free charges through compton scattering. Geomagnetic storms from coronal mass ejections will not hurt small disconnected electronics or transistor junctions. The timescale of the rate of change in the Earth's magnetic field is not short. There are not high frequency components. Only long conductors like oil pipelines, telecommuncations wires, and power lines and the backbone transformers will be effected. The integrated circuits in your smart phone will not be. Also, like I said in the hackaday thread, in most of the ways that matter (ie, geomagnetic effect at earth) the 1989 CME that blacked out part of Canada was significantly stronger than the Carrington event. We, as Earth, haven't really added that much more long distance conductors since then. I wouldn't worry. That isn't to say there's no danger. Certainly trying to replace the backbone transformers when the electrical infrastructure is down would be very hard. Those things take months to make, ship, and install in a well operating society. A CME that knocks out the power grid everywhere would be devastating.

mabbo 8y ago
> Only long conductors like oil pipelines, telecommuncations wires, and power lines and the backbone transformers will be effected That is a huge relief. I was worried it was going to affect things that civilization has come to rely on heavily. (Seriously though, your insight is very welcome and I thank you for it!)
ggerules 8y ago
Good point about people confusing geomagnetic storms and flare ionizing light. To add to the last point about a CME that knocks out the power grid, I heard a presentation while I worked 2 summers ago at the frontier development lab, (https://frontierdevelopmentlab.org/fdl-2017/ https://frontierdevelopmentlab.org/fdl-2017/). I was on the solar-terrestrial interactions team. One of the points in the presentation is that there are only one or two companies in the world that makes these transformers and there aren't a lot of these transformers just siting around waiting for a Carrington level event. One of our goals for the summer was to use a LSTM neural network to forecast what would happen and possibly give warning when a CME slams into the earth. We could forecast a little bit into the future using geomag data. One of the subgoals of this work was to bring awareness and potentially help warn parties involved with the world's infrastructure. A key point out of this is that there are dedicated researchers in both the public and private sectors that study sun. They are busily trying to understand how the sun works and help create systems that help warn satellite and power grid operators. Two presentations from that year worth taking a look at might be of interest. Solar-Storm Prediction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T_lHUwxTes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T_lHUwxTes Solar-Terrestrial Interactions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5QQnZLjSBE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5QQnZLjSBE Applications for this year's FDL summer program can be found at. https://frontierdevelopmentlab.org/apply/ https://frontierdevelopmentlab.org/apply/
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mabbo 8y ago

> Only long conductors like oil pipelines, telecommuncations wires, and power lines and the backbone transformers will be effected That is a huge relief. I was worried it was going to affect things that civilization has come to rely on heavily. (Seriously though, your insight is very welcome and I thank you for it!)

ggerules 8y ago

Good point about people confusing geomagnetic storms and flare ionizing light. To add to the last point about a CME that knocks out the power grid, I heard a presentation while I worked 2 summers ago at the frontier development lab, (https://frontierdevelopmentlab.org/fdl-2017/ https://frontierdevelopmentlab.org/fdl-2017/). I was on the solar-terrestrial interactions team. One of the points in the presentation is that there are only one or two companies in the world that makes these transformers and there aren't a lot of these transformers just siting around waiting for a Carrington level event. One of our goals for the summer was to use a LSTM neural network to forecast what would happen and possibly give warning when a CME slams into the earth. We could forecast a little bit into the future using geomag data. One of the subgoals of this work was to bring awareness and potentially help warn parties involved with the world's infrastructure. A key point out of this is that there are dedicated researchers in both the public and private sectors that study sun. They are busily trying to understand how the sun works and help create systems that help warn satellite and power grid operators. Two presentations from that year worth taking a look at might be of interest. Solar-Storm Prediction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T_lHUwxTes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T_lHUwxTes Solar-Terrestrial Interactions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5QQnZLjSBE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5QQnZLjSBE Applications for this year's FDL summer program can be found at. https://frontierdevelopmentlab.org/apply/ https://frontierdevelopmentlab.org/apply/

deleted 8y ago

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