Solar superstorms could cause extended Internet outages

The paper sounds a bit like speculation or doom-mongering, not an actual engineering prediction.

The big assumption is that undersea cables will be affected by a geomagnetic storm. I see two major issues with that: Seawater is conductive, and the oceans can't build up a significant potential difference. I also trust that engineers would include grounding earths and isolation switches on the undersea cables.
 
The IEEE discussed this issue back in 2012:
spectrum.ieee.org

A Perfect Storm of Planetary Proportions

The approach of the solar maximum is an urgent reminder that power grids everywhere are more vulnerable than ever to geomagnetic effects
spectrum.ieee.org spectrum.ieee.org

The article states that the geomagnetic potential induces currents, so my seawater statement is wrong.
 
Gordon_R said:
The paper sounds a bit like speculation or doom-mongering, not an actual engineering prediction.

The big assumption is that undersea cables will be affected by a geomagnetic storm. I see two major issues with that: Seawater is conductive, and the oceans can't build up a significant potential difference. I also trust that engineers would include grounding earths and isolation switches on the undersea cables.
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Its a real threat. Its just that lack of internet won't matter if you are having to restart half the worlds power grids

It won't be as dire as they make it out, but 1-2 weeks without power in many places won't be fun
 
This is a rubbish story. Nothing of the sort of magnitude happened in 2012.
The worst one I know of was in 2003 which damaged transformers at Eskom power stations (Matimba and Ruacana). Google and you will find the reports.

Also, the phenomenon happens in copper cables. The bigger risk is the voltage rises in power cables when these events happen.

But let's go look what happened in 2012 shall we..

From Wikipedia:
The solar storm of 2012 was an unusually large and strong coronal mass ejection (CME) event that occurred on July 23 that year. It missed the Earth with a margin of approximately nine days, as the equator of the Sun rotates around its own axis with a period of about 25 days.[1] The region that produced the outburst was thus not pointed directly towards the Earth at that time.
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Sapphiron said:
Its a real threat. Its just that lack of internet won't matter if you are having to restart half the worlds power grids

It won't be as dire as they make it out, but 1-2 weeks without power in many places won't be fun
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Wishful thinking, power plants have to sync with the grid again, that can take a month or more.
 
wizardofid said:
Wishful thinking, power plants have to sync with the grid again, that can take a month or more.
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Actually I found out it takes a few hours... Eskom knows how to short-cut it. I did some research and found out that even overseas it doesn't take much time to synch plant as these things are now computer controlled.

When you look past the scaremongering and outright solicitation of Chicken Little reactions, the fundamentals of electricity come into play.

We had one in 2003, I don't remember a single power outage, but I do know my network switches got fried nicely- they were attached to long cable runs.

What happens is essentially voltages get induced into copper conductors. The satellites in orbit are way worse affected, some even get damaged beyond repair due to surface charging and high energy particles going right through the bus and smacking a CPU or memory chip

The induced voltages are not uniform and happen at different rates in different places.. and since much of the internet is on optical fibre for reasons of economy, I don't see there being an issue, save for the power one. The trips would occur on any overhead cables exposed typically.
 
PaulMurkin said:
Actually I found out it takes a few hours... Eskom knows how to short-cut it. I did some research and found out that even overseas it doesn't take much time to synch plant as these things are now computer controlled.

When you look past the scaremongering and outright solicitation of Chicken Little reactions, the fundamentals of electricity come into play.

We had one in 2003, I don't remember a single power outage, but I do know my network switches got fried nicely- they were attached to long cable runs.

What happens is essentially voltages get induced into copper conductors. The satellites in orbit are way worse affected, some even get damaged beyond repair due to surface charging and high energy particles going right through the bus and smacking a CPU or memory chip

The induced voltages are not uniform and happen at different rates in different places.. and since much of the internet is on optical fibre for reasons of economy, I don't see there being an issue, save for the power one. The trips would occur on any overhead cables exposed typically.
Click to expand...

It's eksdom we talking about here.....lol
 
PaulMurkin said:
Actually I found out it takes a few hours... Eskom knows how to short-cut it. I did some research and found out that even overseas it doesn't take much time to synch plant as these things are now computer controlled.

When you look past the scaremongering and outright solicitation of Chicken Little reactions, the fundamentals of electricity come into play.

We had one in 2003, I don't remember a single power outage, but I do know my network switches got fried nicely- they were attached to long cable runs.

What happens is essentially voltages get induced into copper conductors. The satellites in orbit are way worse affected, some even get damaged beyond repair due to surface charging and high energy particles going right through the bus and smacking a CPU or memory chip

The induced voltages are not uniform and happen at different rates in different places.. and since much of the internet is on optical fibre for reasons of economy, I don't see there being an issue, save for the power one. The trips would occur on any overhead cables exposed typically.
Click to expand...
Yeah but you have to factor in the negotiations with Fiedel & flight time of the engineers from Cuba..
 
You have to wonder about papers and studies of sort. Always predicting some major catastrophe or end of world senario. Remember the collider was to supposed to create mimi black holes and suck in earth. Not a single space related doomsday incident over the last 2000. Or even in the history of human civilization. Only thing was the extinction of dinosaurs.

Earth sure is a lucky planet. Maybe life really only exist here.
 
Sads-1-zn said:
You have to wonder about papers and studies of sort. Always predicting some major catastrophe or end of world senario. Remember the collider was to supposed to create mimi black holes and suck in earth. Not a single space related doomsday incident over the last 2000. Or even in the history of human civilization. Only thing was the extinction of dinosaurs.

Earth sure is a lucky planet. Maybe life really only exist here.
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Obviously if there was something major that happened in the past then we wouldn't exist lol. What I mean there are no cave paintings or something to show anything falling from the sky or something weird and crazy happening above.
 
Sads-1-zn said:
You have to wonder about papers and studies of sort. Always predicting some major catastrophe or end of world senario. Remember the collider was to supposed to create mimi black holes and suck in earth. Not a single space related doomsday incident over the last 2000. Or even in the history of human civilization. Only thing was the extinction of dinosaurs.

Earth sure is a lucky planet. Maybe life really only exist here.
Click to expand...
So true, the only thing that the Hadron collider sucked in was donor funds. It's like a Really Bad Eskom , SAA, plus all ANC SOEs on steroids :ROFL::laugh:

The Large Hadron Collider took about a decade to construct, for a total cost of about $4.75 billion. There are several different experiments going on at the LHC, including the CMS and ATLAS Detectors which discovered the Higgs boson. CERN contributes about 20% of the cost of those experiments, which is a total of about $5.5 billion a year. The remainder of the funding for those experiments is provided by international collaborations. Computing power is also a significant part of the cost of running CERN - about $286 million annually. Electricity costs alone for the LHC run about $23.5 million per year. The total operating budget of the LHC runs to about $1 billion per year.

The Large Hadron Collider was first turned on in August of 2008, then stopped for repairs in September until November 2009. Taking all of those costs into consideration, the total cost of finding the Higgs boson ran about $13.25 billion.
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