Another Threat from Space
What a perfect space storm can do to Earth:
The surface of the sun is a roiling mass of plasma – charged high-energy particles – some of which escape the surface and travel through space as the solar wind. From time to time, that wind carries a billion-tonne glob of plasma, a fireball known as a coronal mass ejection (see “When hell comes to Earth”). If one should hit the Earth’s magnetic shield, the result could be truly devastating.
The incursion of the plasma into our atmosphere causes rapid changes in the configuration of Earth’s magnetic field which, in turn, induce currents in the long wires of the power grids. The grids were not built to handle this sort of direct current electricity. The greatest danger is at the step-up and step-down transformers used to convert power from its transport voltage to domestically useful voltage. The increased DC current creates strong magnetic fields that saturate a transformer’s magnetic core. The result is runaway current in the transformer’s copper wiring, which rapidly heats up and melts. This is exactly what happened in the Canadian province of Quebec in March 1989, and six million people spent 9 hours without electricity. But things could get much, much worse than that.
When it can happen:
The “perfect storm” is most likely on a spring or autumn night in a year of heightened solar activity – something like 2012. Around the equinoxes, the orientation of the Earth’s field to the sun makes us particularly vulnerable to a plasma strike.
Please God, not autumn 2012.
(Via Grinding.)
Related posts:
- Ten Ways to Travel in Deep Space Some of them, though, won’t get you very deep into space, and some others look impossible, while the possible ones require technologies we still don’t have....
- Why Space Exploration Is Going Nowhere in the U.S. Because space exploration is incompatible with democracy. And because everything that can be done with current technology and makes sense, has already been done. ...
- How Real Space Battles Will Be Fought The physics of future space battles. We need to be prepared when Martian colonists rise up against the United Earth Empire in, say, 2776. And...
- No Recession Yet for U.S. Space Industry The space industry grew in 2008 despite the economic downturn: [T]he space industry boosted revenues by $6 billion to $257 billion in 2008, up from...
- How Do Female Astronauts Menstruate in Space? In case you were wondering. Plus, why an all-girl crew might be optimal for long-term space exploration. ...
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.