Big Sunspot with chances of big flares

[Delta4Embassy]

SpaceWeather.com -- News and information about meteor showers solar flares auroras and near-Earth asteroids

"Big sunspot AR2192 has grown even bigger, spreading across 1/3rd more solar terrain today than it did yesterday. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the expansion.

The chances of an explosion are growing along with the sunspot. On Oct. 20th, NOAA forecasters boosted the odds of an M-class flare to 60% and an X-flare to 20%.

Yesterday, the sunspot produced a long-duration X1-flare (movie) and a strong HF radio blackout over Asia and Australia. The next X-flare, if one occurs, will be even more geoeffective as the sunspot turns toward Earth."

Last time sunspots were this big you could see them with the naked eye (albeit at sunset, low on the horizon, don't blind yourself.)

 

[MisterBeale]

My son and I watched that new Godzilla movie that just landed on video. My gosh, they totally dis-informed the public on the nature of EMP pulses. Like a city's infrastructure can come back the same day after one. lol

Failure to Protect U.S. Against Electromagnetic Pulse Threat Could Make 9/11 Look Trivial Someday
Failure to Protect U.S. Against Electromagnetic Pulse Threat Could Make 9 11 Look Trivial Someday - Forbes

Don’t Forget About The Sun

And then there is the possibility of a massive geomagnetic storm, far greater than the Hydro-Quebec solar storm of 1989, which was sufficient to cause the HQ grid to collapse within 92 seconds, took out a transformer at a nuclear plant in New Jersey.

A geomagnetic storm occurs when a solar wind interacts with the planet’s magnetosphere and transfers energy to that magnetosphere. This results in increased electric current, which can be picked up by power lines essentially acting as antennae.

The famous 1859 Carrington event reportedly created an aurora borealis bright enough so that people in the northeast could read a newspaper at night. The EMP impact was sufficient to cause telegraph machines to catch on fire and took out the newly laid transatlantic cable. In today’s world, it could have a significantly more devastating effect. The good news here is that with a solar event taking place 96 million miles away, we would have approximately 20 hours of lead time, and could potentially take the power grid offline to protect transformers and other infrastructure until an event passed by. That said, a proactive continental blackout could be quite damaging.

Image: rezn8d.net

However, no one knows if a voluntary blackout of the grid would, in fact save it from an EMP catastrophe. For certain, we lack the command and control arrangements or a plan in place to execute a coordinated nationwide shutdown of the grid by its 3,000 utilities, nor have we ever practiced such a contingency, or practiced turning the nation back “on”–performing what would technically be called a nationwide “black start.”

This threat is more than theoretical. Just two years ago, a solar superstorm erupted that was likely similar to or greater in magnitude than the Carrington event. Fortunately, the earth was not in the line of fire, but it was close. Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado was quoted as saying that had the event occurred a week earlier, the earth would have been hit. Had that occurred “we would still be picking up the pieces.”

Given that high level of uncertainty, what would it take to harden the grid against either a solar or military EMP event? That depends on what and who you are trying to protect against and what kind of post-event capabilities one is trying to achieve.

 

[Delta4Embassy]

Found out a lot about nuclear detonation-based EMPs during the nuclear testing years. Think Operation Starfish was the low-orbital detonation that blacked out much of the US from the EMP. By comaprison to what the Sun has done and could do again, that's pretty trivial. A nuclear EMP isn't likely, a Solar hiccup is VERY likely.

 

[sameech]

Yes the sun can destroy all life on earth. That is not secret. Nothing we can do about it. I imagine that the people most affected will be ham radio types.

 

[Old Rocks]

Wrong, Sameech.

What If the Biggest Solar Storm on Record Happened Today

In fact, the biggest solar storm on record happened in 1859, during a solar maximum about the same size as the one we're entering, according to NASA.

That storm has been dubbed the Carrington Event, after British astronomer Richard Carrington, who witnessed the megaflare and was the first to realize the link between activity on the sun and geomagnetic disturbances on Earth.

During the Carrington Event, northern lights were reported as far south as Cuba and Honolulu, while southern lights were seen as far north as Santiago, Chile. (See pictures of auroras generated by the Valentine's Day solar flare.)

The flares were so powerful that "people in the northeastern U.S. could read newspaper print just from the light of the aurora," Daniel Baker, of the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, said at a geophysics meeting last December.

In addition, the geomagnetic disturbances were strong enough that U.S. telegraph operators reported sparks leaping from their equipment—some bad enough to set fires, said Ed Cliver, a space physicist at the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory in Bedford, Massachusetts.

In 1859, such reports were mostly curiosities. But if something similar happened today, the world's high-tech infrastructure could grind to a halt.