
Near Miss: The Solar Superstorm of July 2012 (2014) - YeGoblynQueenne
https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/23jul_superstorm/
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Dogleg
PhD student working on geomagnetic storms- these storms would cause changes in
the earth's magnetic fields of hundreds of nanoTeslas, and cause electric
fields of a few (<10) volts per km. Only reason why power networks are
affected is because they span hundreds of Kms.

The geomagnetic storms are generally over long periods- low frequencies. From
a quick glance at Wikipedia, this is unlike an EMP.

I really doubt they'd affect equipment like HDDs.

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int_19h
Solar storms can be extremely damaging to the power grid (and by extension, to
electronics that is plugged directly into that grid). But, as you note, the
distances required to produce a strong current are just too great for any home
electronics to be affected.

There's a lot of mythology surrounding this, largely because valid information
on nuclear EMP is conflated with EM effects accompanying CME (coronal mass
ejections). There is some overlap between the two, but the differences are far
bigger.

[http://www.futurescience.com/emp/E1-E2-E3.html](http://www.futurescience.com/emp/E1-E2-E3.html)

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remarkEon
The video is fascinating, if a bit frightening.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ukQhycKOFw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ukQhycKOFw)

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Kenji
Stupid question, but would such a storm wipe my HDDs that hold all my private
data? If so, what would be a safe storage with similar capacities?

~~~
cletus
This may interest you:

[https://superuser.com/questions/1014071/how-to-protect-my-
di...](https://superuser.com/questions/1014071/how-to-protect-my-digital-data-
from-solar-flares)

Standard advice: the best thing you can do for protecting data is have an
offsite backup. This could be as simple as Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3,
etc.

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hive_mind
Why wouldn't the storm wipe out Dropbox / Amazon's HDDs too?

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cletus
There are several factors:

1\. Cloud storage is likely to have a more resilient backup strategy;

2\. Magnetic storms tend to be localized so you want to spread geographically.
So if for example you copy data to hard drives and store them at home and work
you're still in danger to a localized storm; and

3\. And this is the big one. A single physical location exposes you to far
more likely risks than solar storms such as fire, flooding and theft.

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marcosdumay
About #2, solar storms are world-wide.

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M_Grey
The upside at least there, is that there is some warning; you could stick
everything you care about into a Faraday cage. Power lines... not so much.

~~~
marcosdumay
No need. Just unplug them from the power lines and you are good.

