A new NASA-funded study details what might happen to our modern, high-tech society in the event of a ’super solar flare’ followed by an extreme geomagnetic storm. Some of the conclusions might surprise you.

January 21, 2009: Did you know a solar flare can make your toilet stop working?

That’s the surprising conclusion of a NASA-funded study by the National Academy of Sciences entitled Severe Space Weather Events—Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts. In the 132-page report, experts detailed what might happen to our modern, high-tech society in the event of a “super solar flare” followed by an extreme geomagnetic storm. They found that almost nothing is immune from space weather—not even the water in your bathroom.

The problem begins with the electric power grid. “Electric power is modern society’s cornerstone technology on which virtually all other infrastructures and services depend,” the report notes. Yet it is particularly vulnerable to bad space weather. Ground currents induced during geomagnetic storms can actually melt the copper windings of transformers at the heart of many power distribution systems. Sprawling power lines act like antennas, picking up the currents and spreading the problem over a wide area. The most famous geomagnetic power outage happened during a space storm in March 1989 when six million people in Quebec lost power for 9 hours:

According to the report, power grids may be more vulnerable than ever. The problem is interconnectedness. In recent years, utilities have joined grids together to allow long-distance transmission of low-cost power to areas of sudden demand. On a hot summer day in California, for instance, people in Los Angeles might be running their air conditioners on power routed from Oregon. It makes economic sense—but not necessarily geomagnetic sense. Interconnectedness makes the system susceptible to wide-ranging “cascade failures.”

Source: Nasa Science – click here for full article

 

True story: NASA technology saves Claus from a disaster at sea! Christmas (and the sport of fishing) may never be the same.

Here is a good example of how data coming from space (close to earth) could help the average person.

Dec. 24, 2008: Last year, a certain Mr. Claus got a very nice gift.

Terry Claus, captain of a 53-foot charter boat called The Qualifier, received something that helped him avoid a disaster at sea–namely, data transmitted onto his GPS screen. If “data” isn’t your idea of a Christmas gift, just listen:

“One night, my wife, children, and I were fishing for swordfish 25 miles off the Miami coast,” says Claus. “We saw black clouds to the west. That’s not unusual where we live. Florida storms sometimes build over land and then dissipate. But that night, when I checked the radar on my GPS, I saw an incredible line of severe thunderstorms moving towards us — and fast.”

“I checked the lightning strike screen, and it looked like a chained link fence of continuous lightning,” he continues. “I shouted, ‘Reel in the lines! We have to get out of here fast!’ I could see on the screen where the cloud mass was weakest, so I followed that route. A 747 jet flew overhead and seemed to be following the same route we were following. We must have been looking at the same data! We made it to port safely.”

The Short-term Prediction Research and Transition (SPoRT) project at the Marshall Space Flight Center “facilitates the transfer and use of unique NASA satellite data to improve short-term weather forecasts, and disseminates unique weather products like those that helped make Claus’s bird’s eye view of the weather possible that night,” says Dr. Gary Jedlovec, satellite meteorologist and SPoRT principal investigator.

 

Source: Nasa Science – click here for full article

 

 

 

NASA’s five THEMIS spacecraft have discovered a breach in Earth’s magnetic field ten times larger than anything previously thought to exist. The size of the opening and the strange way it forms could overturn long-held ideas of space physics.

“At first I didn’t believe it,” says THEMIS project scientist David Sibeck of the Goddard Space Flight Center. “This finding fundamentally alters our understanding of the solar wind-magnetosphere interaction.”

The magnetosphere is a bubble of magnetism that surrounds Earth and protects us from solar wind. Exploring the bubble is a key goal of the THEMIS mission, launched in February 2007. The big discovery came on June 3, 2007, when the five probes serendipitously flew through the breach just as it was opening. Onboard sensors recorded a torrent of solar wind particles streaming into the magnetosphere, signaling an event of unexpected size and importance.

“The opening was huge—four times wider than Earth itself,” says Wenhui Li, a space physicist at the University of New Hampshire who has been analyzing the data. Li’s colleague Jimmy Raeder, also of New Hampshire, says “1027 particles per second were flowing into the magnetosphere—that’s a 1 followed by 27 zeros. This kind of influx is an order of magnitude greater than what we thought was possible.”

 

Source: Nasa Science – click here for full article