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Researchers identify largest ever solar storm in 14k-year-old tree rings
- bill38 3y agoWhat would be the impact of solar storm on nuclear power plants ? Would we have several Fukushimas ?
- PumpkinSpice 3y agoIn theory, no. But in theory, we weren't supposed to have the first Fukushima to begin with. A bunch of things went precisely the wrong way. That said, Fukushima ultimately wasn't bad, especially in terms of atmospheric releases / land contamination. It was scary, but nowhere near many of our worst "conventional" industrial disasters, let alone Chernobyl.
- alex_young 3y agoDirect impact should be negligible, but perhaps some impact on water pumps could be a problem as was the case for Fukushima.
- dakial1 3y ago>A similar solar storm today would be catastrophic for modern technological society—potentially wiping out telecommunications and satellite systems, causing massive electricity grid blackouts, and costing us billions of pounds. I wonder if any country has a disaster recovery plan for this kind on event.
- callalex 3y agoWe could always fall back to running the internet with RFC1149 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1149 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1149
- divan 3y agoSome hope on Colapse OS [1] perhaps? [1] http://collapseos.org http://collapseos.org
- eddtries 3y agoMust be somewhat depressing to be living in a state of fear such that you build an OS specifically for when you assume all supply chains fail globally, probably this decade. Seems both stressful AND unlikely your project will truly be useful in such a position. Not knocking the tech or author, just a thought about such depressing predictions!
- 3-cheese-sundae 3y agoWell, someone's got to think of contingencies. It might as well be someone who's already prone to such consuming thoughts. I hope it's never needed, but if it is, there's also some chance we may be thankful for its existence.
- ForHackernews 3y agoIt's a very interesting hobby project that involves thinking about technology in a different way. It's not any more useless than Haskell.
- civilitty 3y agoFEMA's got you covered: https://www.fema.gov/sites/default/files/2020-07/fema_incident-annex_space-weather.pdf https://www.fema.gov/sites/default/files/2020-07/fema_incide... That's not the disaster recovery plan itself, it's FEMA instructing a bunch of agencies and departments to make their own. Ordered by Executive Order 13744 signed by President Obama in 2016.
- KMag 3y agoI believe the FEMA plans are for Carrington event-level storms, not a once-in-15,000-years storm.
- KMag 3y agoBeing properly prepared for a once-in-15k-years storm would likely require such a cost over such a long time for the expected benefit that it's not worth it. Hardening infrastructure against extremely rare disasters likely means less infrastructure, and probably fewer social programs. Sometimes the objective rational choice is to do nothing for the mega-disasters and instead just prepare/harden for once-a-century or once-a-millennium event.
- sgu999 3y ago> Hardening infrastructure against extremely rare disasters likely means less infrastructure, and probably fewer social programs. Or less dividends. This solar storm is a very extreme example, but we've all witnessed how greed got us very unprepared for a pandemic, climate changed induced weather events, new wars, etc.
- KMag 3y agoBut lower dividend yields mean lower yielding retirement funds, with quality of life effects downstream from that. Now, there's plenty to be said about the funding side of the equation to improve wealth inequality and/or increase budgets, but that's orthogonal to the spending-side necessary tradeoffs to harden against extremely rare disasters. In other words, supposing you had the political pull to get more money entirely from the richest 0.01%, 1%, or 5% (and putting aside that not everyone agrees that would be good), that extra money would probably still be better spent on more infrastructure and social programs, not on hardening against extremely rare events.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y agoWhy does it have to be either/or? Planetary GDP is around $85tn annually. The US military budget on its own is around $1tn. One-off mitigation costs followed by annual maintenance would barely be a rounding error on that. They'd have the added benefit of hardening systems against hostile EMP, which is a more likely threat.
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- akomtu 3y agoUnless this precious tech is used against the people: surveillance, control, etc.
- ryanblakeley 3y agoI interviewed a guy from the NOAA to ask about that. The gist is 1) the military has hardened satellites 2) they have a phone-tree system for alerting grid operators and 3) many high voltage transformers have back-up systems in hardened storage. [1] https://ryanblakeley.net/p/solar-flare https://ryanblakeley.net/p/solar-flare
- idiotsecant 3y agoI won't comment on 1 and 2 but 3) is laughably untrue. I guess the word 'many' might be stretched to mean 'a few' but I've worked at more than one very large utility directly as an engineer responsible for design of large generation and transmission interface systems and these transformers are not only not spare, they're almost impossible to get quickly even at current market demand. If you toasted even 10 percent of the large generation and transmission transformers in North America it would be years before the grid would even come close to working again, and that's if there was nation state level resources applied. These are specialized machines that require specialized labor and specialized materials from a specialized international supply chain to construct. I'd make the bet that total recovery would be decades.
- foobarian 3y agoThis keeps coming up and I keep wondering how in the world are large transformers that complicated to build. And I don't mean that in a dismissive way but a "boy do I have a gap in my knowledge of the world" way :-)
- s1artibartfast 3y agoI think that is a pretty common reaction when it comes to physical/mechanical objects. Another way of thinking about it which might be helpful is. Hundreds or thousands of very talented engineers have been working non-stop for 150+ years in a transformer arms race. This has resulted in incredibly high performance designs and incredibly high requirements.
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- ForHackernews 3y agoIn the UK, the National Grid Operator maintains "black start" plans[0] for rebooting the entire national electrical grid from a zero power situation, and they pay individual plants to conduct annual drills. However, for obvious reasons, these plans have never been tried in anything close to real-world conditions, and it's something of an open question whether it would work. [0] https://www.theblackoutreport.co.uk/2023/06/13/black-start/ https://www.theblackoutreport.co.uk/2023/06/13/black-start/
- piuantiderp 3y agoIt's not just rebooting. There will be damage even in stored brand-new equipment
- rini17 3y agoHow it gets damaged? For comparison lightning is stronger than solar flares but only rarely damages stored unconnected equipment.
- deepmauka 3y agoThe earth and everything in and on it is part of an electrical system, as solar emissions wash across the landscape they’ll stimulate the flow of electrons in everything especially metal and circuit based items. Since circuits in many items are delicate things, designed for very specific currents, it will be a near guarantee that electrical components will be damaged.
- throwaway837367 3y agoThis is incorrect. A solar flare is not like an EMP. It's low frequency so only wires that are miles long would be energized. It could possibly destroy electronics that aren't protected by a power strip. But no, it's not going to destroy your cellphone or the electronics in your car.
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- kristopolous 3y agoThe last time we had a significant solar storm was during the telegraph age, the Carrington Event of 1859: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event "telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed, in some cases giving their operators electric shocks. Telegraph pylons threw sparks" No doubt this historical one is much more significant, but even another 1859 Carrington would be a huge disaster - the lead time and transportation logistics for things like power station transformers can be months especially if now you need 100 of them
- beebeepka 3y ago> "...in some cases giving their operators electric shocks. Telegraph pylons threw sparks" The real life precursor of exploding starship screens/consoles
- kristopolous 3y agoThere was a great radio ecoshock episode about this a couple years ago. Let me see if I can dig it up. https://www.ecoshock.org/2017/03/emp-instant-blackout.html https://www.ecoshock.org/2017/03/emp-instant-blackout.html The guy's journalistic style is certainly on the alarmist side but the scholarship is pretty solid and unusually expansive. From the text: "Because most utilities have not protected their giant transformers, and there are no replacements, the grid would stay down for at least a year, or a decade, or forever. There are ways to protect the system, but a captured Washington regulation system has not pushed for these simple steps. A hostile power aside, our expert guest tells us an EMP hit is “inevitable” within the time of those living now, because the Sun can also crash our electrical systems world-wide. A large solar storm, big enough to do it, was seen in 1859. It’s called the Carrington Event. If part of the Sun blows our way, all satellites are knocked out. The wires of our electric system act like antennae, receiving the deadly pulse." I doubt the doomsayer timetable but the industrial capacity and delivery concern is absolutely valid. If this actually happened, I think community solar would be choked as it gets ramped up everywhere at once and some neighborhoods would have power centers to go charge lithium ion portable power packs as the overall grids become decentralized. Shelf-stable, non-refrigerated food would become the norm and people would just make do with less electricity. We'd go back to a cash economy and things like night time entertainment that relied on sound systems and electric lights would become almost non-existent. Without street lights, nighttime in general would be dramatically quieter The real problem would be people who have to use battery powered medical devices who don't have convenient ways to charge. But yes, huge problem regardless
- helpfulContrib 3y ago[dead]
- ortusdux 3y agoThe US needs to fund the Strategic Transformer Reserve! DOE estimated the cost would be $500m in 2017, but it would be a bargain at 4x the price. https://www.energy.gov/ceser/articles/strategic-transformer-reserve-report-congress-march-2017 https://www.energy.gov/ceser/articles/strategic-transformer-...
- londons_explore 3y agoI disagree. A large solar storm is unlikely to damage many transformers. Transformers have low impedance, yet solar storms have the biggest impact on high impedance systems (like copper telephone cables, especially when 'on hook'). The only time a power network is high impedance is when it isn't connected (ie. when part of the power network is switched off). Trivial operational changes could be made to ensure that offline parts of a power network are grounded during a solar storm. Reserve transformers might be a good plan for other reasons - eg. fast recovery after a war on US soil - transformers are usually early targets in war, and hard to defend.
- pvg 3y agotransformers are usually early targets in war, and hard to defend early targets in war, and hard to defend. Not if they're more than meets the eye, like, say, robots in disguise.
- keepamovin 3y agoEven a Carrington-level event, which refers to a solar coronal mass ejection (CME) observed in 1859, is indeed a concern for modern electrical infrastructure. During such an event, geomagnetically induced currents (GICs) could flow through electrical grids, potentially overheating transformers and causing them to fail. These GICs are particularly harmful to transformers because they can lead to half-cycle saturation, increasing the reactive power demand and causing internal hotspots. While transformers themselves may have low impedance, it’s the connectivity and expanse of the grid system that makes them vulnerable during geomagnetic disturbances. The longer the conductive path, the more susceptible the system is to GICs, regardless of the impedance characteristics of individual components like transformers. An X500-level solar flare would be many times more powerful than the Carrington event and could wreak havoc on our electrical infrastructure. Given our increasing reliance on electricity for everything from communications to transportation, the societal impact would be significant. Hence, the idea of a Strategic Transformer Reserve isn’t just about preparing for solar storms; it’s a multi-hazard approach that also considers other threats like cyber-attacks, terrorism, or even conventional warfare. The key question remains: do the potential catastrophic consequences justify the financial and logistical costs of maintaining a transformer reserve? From a risk-assessment standpoint, considering the dire impacts of a severe solar event or other threats, investment in a transformer reserve could be seen as a rational and scientifically justified precaution. Particularly when the lead time to manufacture such equipment is in the order of years. A grid outage of that duration would be biblically catastrophic: without electricity, we have no water, no gasoline, no communications. We’d survive, but the suffering is not something it seems wise to consider an acceptable cost. Especially at a time of enhanced geopolitical competition, the effect of a storm whose severest effects would likely be localized to the sun-facing hemisphere, seems important not to underestimate. I think it would be great if, instead of countries merely having arms races, they had preparedness races. I guess for us ape-brained humans, tribalism feels more compelling than a threat you can’t bite the face off.
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- rokkitmensch 3y ago[dead]
- thejackgoode 3y agoGoogle says we can have 1-4 days of warning for this kind of thing. Is there any approach to circuit breaking that can help appliances against such an event?
- tanbog5 3y agoMove everything into an old multi story carpark that has bad radio reception?
- quickthrower2 3y agoI love murphy’s law arbitrage
- ilyt 3y agoMake sure ones that are metal boxes are grounded. Put all other inside metal box and ground it
- dieselgate 3y agoTangent but the concept of "grounding" is so strange, especially for residential electrical systems. It's literally just a metal stake in the ground
- thejackgoode 3y agoWell, not if you worked on a MacBook using an ungrounded socket in Europe, for example. Forearms are not that strongly insulated
- skullone 3y agoI have an old house that had ungrounded outlets. My MBP made me take on costly electrical repairs cuz I got so sick of the shocks and tingling sensation whenever id touch it while charging. I should've put a multimeter on it to see what voltage and current it carried, didn't "hurt" but it was certainly a noticeable tingling.
- danwee 3y agoPardon my ignorance, but a solar storm would wipe out offline harddrives/ssds/laptops?
- darken 3y agoIt's common to conflate the effects of a solar storm with an EMP; when in reality they're opposite extremes of the same mechanism (i.e. voltage varying over distance). An EMP is a short-duration high voltage spike; i.e. short-wavelength/high-frequency. A solar storm acts on a large scale and causes a long-duration high voltage spike; i.e. long wavelength/low-frequency. So an EMP (i.e. a high altitude nuke) will tend to induce high voltage in small "antennas"; i.e. circuits in an SSD or other transistor electronics like your concern. Whereas a solar storm will induce high voltage in large antennas; think power lines or long cables. However these days there's enough warning and contingencies to mitigate the worst of these effects; i.e. preemptively shut down vulnerable power systems. The grid "crashing" and needing to do a cold start is still very bad, but far better than also getting damaged. ---- Edit: I also want to point out that the above is specific to "on the ground" effects as we're shielded by earth's magnetic field. Satellites still get bombarded directly with heavy radiation/particles, which is much closer to an EMP in terms of acute impact.
- sjducb 3y agoDo you have a reference for that difference in EMP and solar storm? I tried to research this once and couldn’t find anything
- ianburrell 3y agoMy understanding is that solar storms and high-altitude EMPs have similar effects. Both energize the upper atmosphere which induces currents in long conductors. High-altitude EMP does not harm electronics. It is close-by EMP from nuclear blast that harms electronics.
- _3u10 3y agoHopefully one day we'll have a grid designed to carry high voltages over long distances instead of using inefficient low voltage transmission which exposes the grid to these dangers.
- alluro2 3y agoSociety would most certainly collapse within months, if judging by how close to it a lot of places got during the pandemic.
- baetylus 3y agoWhat work would we have to do to prevent such damage?
- nisa 3y agoAbolish capitalism and greed. All attempts at that turned out worse through.
- altairTF 3y agoand replace with what?
- galangalalgol 3y agoThe land of take what you want, with the naive hope that it magically turns into the land of do as you please.
- saiya-jin 3y agoAbolishing part of core human nature... anything less ambitious? Its so easy to be the doomsayer, the 'I told ya so' guy etc... It takes much more mental strength to see the forest for the trees - we humans are extremely resilient and adaptable, and even in worst situations there is always tons of natural good in our hearts. And no society didn't collapse during covid, far from it. Some folks simply mistake change with end, I guess reading too much economic news can do that to even best minds. If current society would collapse, another would pop up instead, walking in the shoes of previous one, even if quite different. With fall of Rome its inhabitants didn't simply vanish into the air in Thanos style. I would be much more worried about things like search for immortality since folks like Putin would burn this world completely to the ground to get and maintain it. Or properly rogue AI, if we ever achieve that.
- fideloper 3y agoI wonder what the health effects to the plants/animals/humans were (if any) due to that?
- mjhay 3y agoThere shouldn't be any effect. Solar storms cause low-frequency fluctuations that can induce significant currents in very long conductors (like hundreds to thousands of kilometers). It's a very big deal for large-scale electrical grids and any copper communication, but it doesn't matter for anything that isn't hooked up to such networks.
- deepmauka 3y agoI had a similar thought, if high energy particles damage/affect DNA could these events contribute in some way to a period of more pronounced speciation?
- cyberax 3y agoJust moving from a seashore to foothills of a mountain will have a vastly larger effect.
- surfsvammel 3y agoWe really need to start harden our grid and in all ways prepare for something like this. It will happen again and I suspect we will say: “no one could have predicted it” once it does.
- PumpkinSpice 3y agoThis is being done across the US. For example: https://www.wapa.gov/newsroom/NewsFeatures/2020/Pages/New-capability-shields-grid-from-solar-storms.aspx https://www.wapa.gov/newsroom/NewsFeatures/2020/Pages/New-ca...
- hyperthesis 3y agobut consider the standard used for water grid 'hardening': 1-in-100-year flood
- brutusborn 3y agoWith better tooling this kind of status quo will change. Choosing a single worst case for design is a product of manual design processes. With modern computer technology we can run multiple cases easily, so we can now use probabilistic engineering techniques. In the future it won’t be “this bridge is good for 1 in 100 year storm” but “this bridge has a 99.99% chance of surviving every storm during its design life.” That will include the very rare events beyond the 100 year horizon.
- ssnistfajen 3y agoMitigation ≠ total prevention It's really not that hard to see this isn't a binary choice.
- quickthrower2 3y agoOr move towards no grid? Solar, batteries, local power storage facilities (like pumps) and backup generators perhaps using natural gas.
- chrisco255 3y ago
- thimkerbell 3y agoWhat would a sufficient Faraday cage look like?
- Stevvo 3y agoA bunker. The atmosphere would have been filled with lighting and plasma vitrifing anything it touched.
- adolph 3y agoverb (vitrifies, vitrifying, vitrified) [with object] convert (something) into glass or a glasslike substance, typically by exposure to heat: the option of vitrifying nuclear waste presents problems | glazes and paintings on pottery are vitrified by firing in the furnace | (as adjective vitrified) : the use of vitrified clay pipes inside buildings is prohibited. Given the trees continued to reproduce, the "solar energetic particle (SEP) spike" was probably not as bad as this characterization. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2022.0206 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2022.020...
- greggsy 3y ago> occurring precisely 14,300 years ago. …precisely? Really?
- PaulHoule 3y agoYou can count individual tree rings, so yeah.
- medstrom 3y agoThe oldest living tree has seen 9,565 birthdays (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Tjikko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Tjikko), but it doesn't have 9,565 rings. Even if it did, there's a gap of at least a few thousand years ;-) I'm impressed they got it exact, but wasn't by ring-counting (only).
- thejoneser 3y agoNot necessarily. You can compare dead trees in the same vicinity that were alive at overlapping time intervals. Patterns in the width of the rings will reveal the period over which their lives overlapped. With enough dead trees, if they are preserved well enough, you could go back significantly further and age trees that are long dead.
- schrectacular 3y agoIt's called "Dendrochronology" and this is exactly how it is done. In the Northern Hemisphere they can date back at least 13,910 years.
- chrisco255 3y agoTrees turn into fossils too sometimes.
- medstrom 3y agoYou still have to figure out when it did. If there's a tree with 800 rings, but it died 100,000 years ago, then there's 100,000 years you have to date by some other method, and add 800 on top.
- Stevvo 3y agoThis evidence supports Robert M. Schoch "Solar induced dark age" theory. I've always been a sucker for fringe archeology. Looks like Hancock et. Al. were right about an ancient cataclysm around this time, but wrong on the cause.
- 8bitsrule 3y agoIf only. The now well-documented Younger Dryas event - whatever it was - was thousands of years later, and has plenty of iridium- and platinum-based proxies (and a whole lot more) worldwide ... with equally sophisticated dating techiques. Space has -many- nasties it has thrown at the Earth. When I was kid and saw the Moon through a telescope, I wondered how the Earth could have escaped that shellacking. It couldn't. (There -was- no 'Earth Impact Database' at the time.)