david wallis is a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Mississippi State University.
that much geomagnetic storm Started on May 10, 2024 Amazing Aurora Borealis, more commonly known as the Northern Lights, can be seen as far south as Mexico. They have also caused headaches for farmers engaged in agriculture. The GPS guided tractor was idle. In the middle of the planting season.
geomagnetic storm It occurs when large bubbles of superheated gas, called plasma, are released from the sun's surface and hit the Earth. These bubbles are known as coronal mass ejections. The plasma of a coronal mass ejection consists of a cloud of electrically charged particles, protons and electrons. When these particles reach the Earth, they interact with the magnetic field that surrounds the Earth. These interactions distort and weaken the magnetic field, which ultimately leads to the strange behavior of the Northern Lights and other natural phenomena.
May 2024 Storm; G5 rating A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration magnitude 1 to 5 geomagnetic storm disrupted GPS communications, making tractor guidance that requires centimeter-level precision impossible. If the storm becomes stronger, it can have much more serious consequences. As an electrical engineer specializing in power grids, I study the threat geomagnetic storms pose of power and internet outages and how to prevent them.
geomagnetic storm
More powerful solar storms occurred, one of which caused major damage to one of the first electronic technologies. On September 1 and 2, 1859, telegraph systems around the world failed catastrophically. Telegraph operators reported receiving electric shocks, telegraphs catching fire, and being able to operate their equipment even with the batteries disconnected. In the evening northern lights You can see as far south as Colombia. Typically, these lights can only be seen at high latitudes in northern Canada, Scandinavia, and Siberia.
What the world experienced that day, now known as the Carrington Event, was the largest recorded account of a geomagnetic storm, far stronger than the May 2024 storm.
Geomagnetic storms have been recorded since the early 19th century, and scientific data from Antarctic ice core samples have shown evidence of an even larger geomagnetic storm that occurred around 774 AD, known as the Miyake Event. That solar flare caused the largest and fastest increase in carbon-14 ever recorded. Geomagnetic storms trigger large amounts of cosmic rays into the Earth's upper atmosphere, producing carbon-14, a radioactive isotope of carbon.
A geomagnetic storm 60% smaller than the Miyake event occurred around AD 993. Ice core samples showed evidence that large geomagnetic storms of similar intensity to the Miyake and Carrington events occur on average once every 500 years.
Scientists were able to estimate the intensity of the Carrington event based on fluctuations in the Earth's magnetic field recorded by observatories at the time. There was no way to measure the magnetic fluctuations of a Miyake event. Instead, scientists measured an increase in carbon-14 in tree rings over that period. The Miyake incident resulted in a 12% increase in carbon-14. By comparison, the Miyake Event dwarfed the G5 Carrington Event, as the Carrington Event increased carbon-14 by less than 1%.
take out one's strength
Today, a geomagnetic storm of the same intensity as the Carrington event could have an impact far greater than that of a telegraph wire and result in a catastrophe. As we become increasingly dependent on electricity and new technologies, system outages can result in trillions of dollars in financial losses and risk to lives if we depend on them. The storm will affect most electrical systems that people use every day.
Geomagnetic storms create induced currents that flow through the power grid. Geomagnetically induced currents, which can exceed 100 amps, flow into electrical components connected to the grid, including transformers, relays, and sensors. 100 amps is equivalent to the electrical service provided to many homes. Currents of this magnitude can cause internal damage to components, resulting in large-scale power outages.
In March 1989, a geomagnetic storm three times smaller than the Carrington event occurred in Quebec, Canada. The storm caused the Hydro-Quebec power grid to collapse. During the storm, high self-induced currents damaged transformers in New Jersey and tripped circuit breakers on the power grid. This power outage left 5 million people without power for 9 hours.
disconnect
In addition to electrical failures, communications will be disrupted worldwide. Your Internet Service Provider may experience an outage, which may disrupt the ability of different systems to communicate with each other. High-frequency communications systems such as ground-to-air, shortwave, and ship-to-shore radios will be disrupted. Satellites in orbit around the Earth can be damaged by loss of circuit boards due to induced currents from geomagnetic storms. This may cause interruptions to satellite-based phone, Internet, radio, and TV.
Additionally, as geomagnetic storms hit the Earth, increased solar activity causes the atmosphere to expand outward. This expansion changes the density of the atmosphere in which the satellite orbits. The dense atmosphere creates drag on the satellite, slowing it down. And if you don't move it to a higher orbit, it could fall back to Earth.
Another area of confusion that could potentially impact daily life is the navigation system. Almost all modes of transportation, from cars to airplanes, use GPS for navigation and tracking. Portable devices such as cell phones, smart watches, and tracking tags also rely on GPS signals transmitted from satellites. Military systems rely heavily on GPS for coordination. Other military detection systems, such as over-the-horizon radars and submarine detection systems, may be disrupted, impeding national defense.
On the Internet side, a geomagnetic storm the size of a Carrington event could create geomagnetic induced currents in the undersea and terrestrial cables that form the backbone of the Internet, as well as in the data centers that store and process all of your emails and text messages. Scientific data sets and even artificial intelligence tools. This could potentially bring down the entire network and prevent servers from connecting to each other.
It's only a matter of time
It's only a matter of time before Earth is hit by another major geomagnetic storm. A storm the size of the Carrington Event could cause significant damage to electricity and communications systems around the world, with power outages lasting several weeks. If the storm were the scale of a Miyake event, the results would be catastrophic for the world, and power outages could last for months, if not longer. Even with space weather warnings from NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center, the world receives only minutes to hours of notice.
I believe it is important to continue researching ways to protect our electrical systems from the effects of geomagnetic storms, including installing devices to protect vulnerable equipment such as transformers and developing strategies to adjust grid loads when solar storms hit. do. That means it's important to work now to minimize disruption from the next Carrington event.
This is an updated version of an article originally published in The Conversation on March 18, 2022, and republished under a Creative Commons License. Updated to include solar storm news for May 2024.