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Solar superflares hit Earth multiple times
- ada1981 5y agoSo what are the odds that we will have a solar super flare?
- Jyaif 5y agoThe odds are 1. The question is when.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- peakaboo 5y agoHopefully tomorrow so we can stop worrying.
- xattt 5y agoCan we have the Cascadia earthquake as well while we’re at it?
- meepmorp 5y agoDon't forget the Yellowstone caldera!
- dylan604 5y agoWhat? No love for the ELE asteroid/comet collision?
- aivisol 5y agoCumbre Vieja megatsunami please as well.
- dylan604 5y agoDinosaur killer sized impact vs your volcano. Which tsunami would be bigger? There's more variability in the impact as the volcano is locked to its location, so fun thought exercise for the disaster pr0n types.
- _yoqn 5y agoGodzilla too?
- irrational 5y agoThis thread reminds me of this Calvin and Hobbes comic: https://thecomicninja.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/calvin-and-hobbes-playtime-large.jpg https://thecomicninja.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/calvin-and...
- andrew_ 5y agoDon't lump me in with that "we."
- tmalsburg2 5y agoNitpick: I think you mean that the probability is 1 and the odds infinity.
- ada1981 5y agoYes, within any given year.
- paunthony 5y agoThat's scary but we can't deny that it will happen.
- superkuh 5y agoIt's pretty darn unlikely in our lifetimes. But you'll know about it yourself without anyone needing to tell you before it happens. The energy available to the initial flare and/or associated coronal mass ejection is roughly proportional to the area of the sunspot group. Before there was a "super" flare and/or CME you'd see the sunspot with your unaided eyes. Check out "The standard flare model in three dimensions. II. Upper limit on solar flare energy" and the figure 4 in particular for size to energy reference. https://arxiv.org/abs/1212.2086 https://arxiv.org/abs/1212.2086
- patwolf 5y agoHow much time would elapse from the point of seeing the sunspot until the flare/CME actually occurs?
- superkuh 5y agoHard to say. For a "super" event the sunspot group might be noticibly big right after it appears and flare during the emergence which would mean a ~day or two warning all the way up to a long established group slowly growing over an entire rotation around the sun and coming back to flare and/or erupt ~29 days later.
- Filligree 5y agoSo, does that mean we'd have time to shut off our power grid and disconnect any long lines of metal? AIUI, it's only a problem if sufficiently long wires are actually connected to vulnerable equipment.
- superkuh 5y agoYes. But I think there'd be a lot of political/social problems with that. The solution for the grid at least is to spend the infrastructure money to put fast ground fault interrupters on all irreplacable (<months) big backbone transformers.
- ipspam 5y ago
- vba616 5y ago"O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon"
- m3047 5y agoThe C14 event in the 700s AD has been noted for a while. When it first came to my attention, it had been posted on The Register and it wasn't "world wide" it was IIRC most impactful in the northern hemisphere. People went looking. Somebody found a "Domesday Book" (diary by a cleric) talking about a "red star".
- xattt 5y agoI’m wondering if the definition of star has shifted over the years. It’s likely that the flare caused red aurora, but it would be pretty diffuse and unlike points of light that we know stars to be.
- Filligree 5y agoIt would also be far further south than normal, and people didn't travel much. The majority would never have seen an aurora before, so the only thing they had as a comparison might be stars.
- ngrilly 5y agoIn the article: > knocking out undersea cables Most undersea cables being optic fiber, I don’t really see why a solar flare would knock them out. Or maybe they are active components like repeaters? But how are they powered up?
- 8bitsrule 5y agoUnderwater damage from an EMP is unlikely. The cables all come ashore somewhere, a more likely place for damage.
- barathr 5y agoSee recent research on this, which expands on the description provided by the other replier: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~sabdujyo/papers/sigcomm21-cme.pdf http://www.ics.uci.edu/~sabdujyo/papers/sigcomm21-cme.pdf
- lmilcin 5y agoUndersea cables use steel for strength and additional conductor to power repeaters. Fiberoptic needs repeaters every couple hundred kilometers, so everything crossing any ocean is actively powered. The damage to the cable would come from difference in potential at the ends of the cable. The cable might be at the ocean bottom but it could still get fried if you apply high voltage that could kill repeaters. And without those the cable is useless. Basically, greatly simplifying, in a solar storm any long conductor might be subjected to high potential difference (potential difference == voltage). It does not matter if the middle is exposed but enough of it needs to be exposed at the ends. So a lot will depend on details of how the cable is actually terminated. And it should be possible to engineer it (ie terminations) so that it is safe from a storm.
- ngrilly 5y agoSuper clear! Thanks!
- marcosdumay 5y agoI don't think the steel support is a real problem. It's conductive, but not that much. One ohm/m is enough to severely limit anything on the kV range over hundreds of km. Steel cable support is often much more resistive than that.
- cletus 5y agoHumans have a tendency to view the very first thing they experience as "normal". This is a warped perception. I mean 120 years ago there had never been human-powered flight. Look where we are now. Some embrace changes. Others try and resist it. Most just accept it. Beyond personal experience, this colours collective consciousness. The earliest human writing that we still have record of is only 5000-6000 years old. There is archaeological evidence os civilization going back 10,000-15,000 years. We've found settlements at the bottom of the English Channel from ~8,000 years ago [1]. This should tell you something: we've seen massive sea level rises in recent Earth history. The last 10,000 years have been relatively stable, abnormally so. There are a host of events that affect life on earth. Just to name a few: solar flares, meteor/asteroid impacts, supervolcanoes, earthquakes, magnetic pole flipping, rapid climate change (cooling and warming), sea levels rising and falling, Milankovitch cycles (ie eccentricity, axial tilt and precession) driving long-term climate, cosmic events (eg gamma ray bursts) and so on. Some of these things are relatively common too in the sense that they've occurred multiple times in the short span of civilization. Beyond these superflare events there are others that cause massive death and destruction (eg [1]). I guess my point is the best we can do is put off the next such event temporarily. There will be another Ice Age, for example. There will be future mass extinctions. Yes, we're wreaking havoc on the planet but anything we're doing now still just feels like tinkering on the smallest scales. Ultimately we're just going to have to learn to adapt. [1]: https://www.livescience.com/1759-stone-age-settlement-english-channel.html https://www.livescience.com/1759-stone-age-settlement-englis... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter_of_536 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter_of_536
- JohnWhigham 5y agoI think it's safe to say that modern civilization will be positively fucked when a Tambora-level eruption (let alone a 536 AD-level one) occurs. Like, decades-long economic depressions. And no nation is equipped to handle that. It's easier to recover when civilizations weren't as connected as they are today, in addition to no electricity grid to have to worry about.
- samatman 5y ago
- qwertyuiop_ 5y agoOne of the most famous solar storms in recorded history is the Carrington Event of 1859. This event, which fried telegraph systems – the peak technology of the time – isn’t even detectable in the carbon-14 data in tree rings. So it would be but a whisper compared to the thundering onslaught of a solar superflare This is not comforting.
- benlumen 5y agoI think about this apocalypse scenario more than nuclear war or anything else. In no time at all we've made the systems that underpin our survival dependant on brand new, high technology that can be blown away like a cobweb. If we learnt anything from covid it's that our governments do not account for systemic risks. The emperor has no clothes, etc.
- NicoJuicy 5y agoThe take-away from COVID is that humanity adapts, the outliers are the minority. Politics is required for a stable environment, but not every politician is as good as you'd wish. The difference now with the past is that everything is connected. We have seen that we "absorbed" it much better/ flexible than what I anticipated. Still getting bad news through the web immediately is not something we had time to adapt to before. Is it perfect, no. Are there issues, sure! Humanity adapts, bad news actually makes prepares us more and makes us find a solution. I'm not worried about an apocalypse. The only thing that I'm worried about is the growth of human population since 1960 actually. But we'll adapt. Just like all other crisis that were the end of the world before. And don't forget, humanity had to go through a lot of shit to get where we are now. Greetings from Bruges, Belgium! https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slag_om_de_IJzer https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slag_om_de_IJzer - translate this. This is practically where I live now ;) ( dutch to English)
- abletonlive 5y agoThis is my view too. It actually surprises me that so many people are doom and gloom when all one has to do is look out the window and realize that's pretty much all humans are good for. We aren't good at preventing things from happening but we are good at adapting to whatever happens. I don't believe climate change will destroy us all. It might make things more uncomfortable than it has to be but when push comes to shove, humans will adapt to pretty much any situation.
- NicoJuicy 5y agoI'm not claiming that climate change will be innocent ( just to be sure). It will impact a lot of people ( in absolute numbers, I'm not sure in relative numbers) before it gets fixed. But humans are indeed pretty good at getting on top of things when it's crucial. It's the preparation part that could use improvement ( definitely on a global participation scale). From another point of view: it's never been this peaceful in the world. Which doesn't mean it's all perfect now, but a reminder of where we came from and how bad it was. Making a "big bad fuzz" out of things is a requirement to acknowledge and to solve them by getting everyone onboard. Edit: misread a bit, I thought you mentioned we were better at preventing things, but you didn't. So... Tldr: I agree!
- louissan 5y ago15.345454,50.5345543;50.53543,45.5454554;34.342534,67.6546;35.5543,110.534543 ... .... .. .. ;EE