
1859 Carrington Event - titzer
https://hackaday.com/2019/01/22/the-1859-carrington-event/
======
superkuh
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.

~~~
ggerules
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/)

------
kawfey
>Some [telegraph] operators, in an attempt to spare their networks from
further damage, disconnected their batteries from the lines, only to find that
they could still send messages using only the current provided by the storm.

That's one of my favorite versions of "if life hands you lemons, make
lemonade" stories.

Knowing what we know now about CME's, I wonder if it has ever been surmised
that one option that might spare some expensive parts of the electric grid is
a massive grid-wide disconnection prior to the CME arrival. This wouldn't save
everything, but I think it would save a lot of blown megatransformers were
they to be removed from transmission lines, reducing induced currents through
them.

------
sb057
Everyone should read the Lloyd's analysis of a potential second event [1].

>The total U.S. population at risk of extended power outage from a Carrington-
level storm is between 20-40 million, with durations of 16 days to 1-2 years.
The duration of outages will depend largely on the availability of spare
replacement transformers. If new transformers need to be ordered, the lead-
time is likely to be a minimum of five months. The total economic cost for
such a scenario is estimated at $0.6-2.6 trillion USD (see Appendix).

>While the probability of an extreme storm occurring is relatively low at any
given time, it is almost inevitable that one will occur eventually. Historical
auroral records suggest a return period of 50 years for Quebec-level storms
and 150 years for very extreme storms, such as the Carrington Event that
occurred 154 years ago.

Bear in mind, this report was authored six years ago.

[1]
[http://www.lloyds.com/~/media/lloyds/reports/emerging%20risk...](http://www.lloyds.com/~/media/lloyds/reports/emerging%20risk%20reports/solar%20storm%20risk%20to%20the%20north%20american%20electric%20grid.pdf)

~~~
dfsegoat
Having been through a multi-day power outage in the 2017 Tubbs Fire (where
many transmission lines + tformers had to be replaced over weeks): I can
honestly say that I don't think we can fathom what would happen during a
multi-week or month power outage.

Imagine: No phones. No internet. No cell or data. No fresh food. No running
water. Can't get gasoline to go somewhere else... The tension is literally
palpable.

It was by far the most mind-altering experience I've had in terms of making me
realize how thin the veil of society really is.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
> I can honestly say that I don't think we can fathom what would happen during
> a multi-week or month power outage.

Pretty much anyone living in a rural or semi-rural area where freezing rain
sometimes happens in the winter or hurricanes sometimes happen in the fall has
experience with a week or longer power outage. It wouldn't be "business as
usual" but a lot of people would be fine. The intersection between those
people and people posting on HN just happens to be low.

~~~
int_19h
A week-long outage is annoying. A month-long outage would be disastrous, even
for those areas. There are many things you can do without power, but e.g.
drugs require refrigeration, and we have people whose life depends on drugs
(think insulin, for starters).

But also, urban areas would be harder hit precisely because they rely on their
infrastructure more. And those areas are also the ones with more people.

------
onychomys
If I was going to become a doomsday prepper, this is about the only thing that
could do it. The article ends by talking about two years of power outages in
the US. That would basically end society as we know it. No communication, no
cars, no clean water, no shipments of food, it'd be chaos. And since it'd be
world-wide, we couldn't even just hold on until the Europeans shipped us new
parts for our factories.

~~~
totalthrowaway
Likely only half the world, given how it arrives -- which probably wouldn't
save us given the interconnectedness of all the supply chains. Could half the
world plausibly build a cell phone?

If you wanted to buy a city-sized transformer today you'd be put on a list for
delivery sometime in the next few years. Trying to replace a continent's worth
is a non-starter.

~~~
dependsontheq
Probably yes, just not the latest model.

------
pierrebai
The idea of the fall of civilsation following such an event is ludicrous.

Given emergencies, governments can setup the necessarily laws and
contingencies to put focus on rebuilding the electrical infrastructure. The
army has generators, which can be used to bootstrap building more and setting
up makeshift transformers. Building transformers is not black magic.
Nationalising eletricity-related patents and some companies to put resource on
what matters and gearing up the rebuilding can be voted on rapidly.

~~~
explainplease
Have you run any numbers to back up your beliefs?

------
rgrieselhuber
For those who enjoy war-gaming how to survive a massive EMP, Jonathan
Hollerman's Survival Theory is a good read.

[https://www.amazon.com/Survival-Theory-Preparedness-
Jonathan...](https://www.amazon.com/Survival-Theory-Preparedness-Jonathan-
Hollerman/dp/069267280X)

------
megous
It would probably end a lot of programming jobs in an instant. Wouldn't it?
The needs would shift to the reconstruction of the infrastructure.

~~~
52-6F-62
I guess make sure you get your exercise in so you can handle a shovel, eh?

------
KineticLensman
General response info at [0]. Tech description of impact of space weather on
electric grids at [1]

I know from work (don't have links, sorry) that some distribution and
transmission network operators include solar disruption in their incident
response planning.

[0] [https://www.ready.gov/space-weather](https://www.ready.gov/space-weather)

[1]
[https://fas.org/irp/agency/dod/jason/spaceweather.pdf](https://fas.org/irp/agency/dod/jason/spaceweather.pdf)

------
russfink
Can someone put into rough terms the probability of encountering a Carrington
event within the next 10 years? E.g., you're more likely to be killed by a
swarm of killer bees in Maine than be hit by a Carrington event.

~~~
saagarjha
From
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronal_mass_ejection#Future_r...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronal_mass_ejection#Future_risk):

> According to a report published in 2012 by physicist Pete Riley of
> Predictive Science Inc., the chance of Earth being hit by a Carrington-class
> storm between 2012 and 2022 is 12%.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
Is it still 12% then?

~~~
madaxe_again
Depends on whether that figure is based on a point sample of expectancy for an
event of that scale, or if it’s based on the expectancy due to the time
elapsed since the last event.

As it’s an independent probability (i.e. the time elapsed since the last event
does not affect the probability of reoccurrence), it’s likely the former, and
therefore the same expected value - 1.2% in any given year.

~~~
thanatropism
You're looking at something like the geometric distribution.

The chance that the event does _not_ happen is 88%. And since years are
independent and identically distributed as you say, 88% = q^10 so q~= 98.7%;
therefore the chances that it does happen are ~=1.3%

(As it turns out, your approximation works because as the time-grid becomes
finer and finer, the geometric process becomes a gamma process. It does fail
dramatically for 2-7 years.)

------
close04
> the previous solar flares had cleared the space between Earth and the Sun to
> make the plasma cloud travel faster

Is the matter in space such a slowdown on the plasma cloud that once cleared
it allows that cloud to travel much faster?

~~~
stan_rogers
Think of it more in terms of the shape of the pulse than of the absolute
speed. (And take it for granted that dumbing things down a bit is,
unfortunately, normal for the popular press. It's usually just as easy to give
a more accurate description in less-technical language, but for whatever
reason, it's rarely done.)

~~~
close04
Ok, the "dumbed down" theory sounds more legitimate. I was wondering why a
cloud of ejected plasma would travel substantially faster once you "clear the
space" in front of it. Especially since much of the distance traveled is
before hitting the magnetopause and Earth's magnetic field. Not much to slow
it down out there, certainly not something a previous flare could clear up.

------
cobbzilla
If you knew it was coming and had a few minutes to prepare, would putting your
HDDs and SSDs in a Faraday cage protect them from damage during such an event?

~~~
megous
Wouldn't disconneting from the grid/any other longer cables be enough?

~~~
cobbzilla
I don’t think you need to be on the grid. A sufficiently large CME would
induce currents in any unshielded electrical device. Kind of like an EMP bomb
would break most cars by destroying the starter motor.

~~~
megous
Yes, but those voltages/currents may be negligible. You can find some numbers
online from the past events, like 4V/km of a power grid. That would not kill
anything I have at home.

~~~
cobbzilla
Interesting. Getting quantitative is a great way to put things in perspective.
I would love to know that "unplug your stuff" is enough to save it from CME
damage.

How extreme would a CME have to be for it to "fry" things that are not
connected to any power source, like a disconnected, powered-off computer? Is
it even possible?

~~~
lenticular
It would be extreme enough that the earth would be sterilized of life due to
radiation from the solar event, so your electronics won't be a big deal in
comparison. The good news is that this won't ever happen.

Induction is going to be more or less proportional to the area enclosed by a
conductor, which essentially means long transmission lines are the things to
worry about. And this is length scales on the order of 10^5 or 10^6 meters,
versus 10^-1 meters for your devices.

------
olivermarks
[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/851876.The_Sun_Kings](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/851876.The_Sun_Kings)
Despite cover and book jacket hype IMO a terrific book on the history of human
sun observation and the Carrington event

------
GnarfGnarf
Backup to DVD. Get a wood stove.

~~~
madaxe_again
If you’ve ever stuck a dvd in the microwave, you’ll know this is a non-
starter. Flux of the magnitude we’re talking about would cause arcing within
the substrate, destroying it.

Back up to paper.

~~~
lenticular
That's not true. Only long conductors are affected significantly by these
events.

------
tapland
To say such an event would be really bad if it happened today is an
understatement.

------
bawana
how many nuclear reactors are hardened against this event?

~~~
noir_lord
Western reactors are designed to fail safe in the event of a complete failure
like this, they'd just scram them.

Of course the same time as the electrical storm trashes the grid shutting down
all the baseload nuke plants would just add to the chaos.

------
usermac
Bullets would explode. I wonder?

~~~
mikestew
The powder in ammunition burns, not explodes. A necessary bit of pedantry
because something has to ignite it, which is the primer. And a primer needs a
sharp blow from a sharpish object (I’ve hammered primers practically flat
without them going off).

In summary, ammunition will not go off.

