They cause devastation, occur every 150 years – and the last one was in 1859
It is inevitable that an extreme solar storm – caused by the Sun ejecting billions of tonnes of highly-energetic matter travelling at a million miles an hour – will hit the Earth at some time in the near future, but it is impossible to predict more than about 30 minutes before it actually happens, a team of engineers has warned.
Solar superstorms are estimated to occur once every 100 or 200 years, with the last one hitting the Earth in 1859.
Although none has occurred in the space age, we are far more vulnerable now than a century ago because of the ubiquity of modern electronics, they said.
In the past half century, there have been a number of "near misses" when an explosive "coronal mass ejection" of energetic matter from the Sun has been flung into space, narrowly bypassing the Earth.
In 1989 a relatively minor solar storm knocked out several key electrical transformers in the Canadian national grid, causing major power blackouts.
Minor solar storms hit the Earth on a regular basis, but these are far less powerful than the 1859 event named after the British astronomer Richard Carrington, which was the last true solar superstorm.
A similar event today would put severe strain the electricity grid, where transformers are particular vulnerable to power surges, as well as degrading the performance of satellites, GPS navigation, aviation and possibly the mobile phone network, particularly the new 4G network, which relies on GPS satellites for timing information.
"Satellites are certainly in the front line of a superstorm. They are part of our infrastructure and we have concerns about their survival in a solar superstorm," said Keith Ryden, a space engineer at Surrey University.
Source:
Independent UK News
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Book Description
Something is just not right these days. It's like we're out of alignment with our core values and have lost respect for . . . respect. Through a detailed exploration of what respect means, how we experience it (and how we process its absence), author Eve Linn invites readers to consider the holistic impact of this societal paradigm shift. Has respect for family members, friends, and strangers-not to mention the self-become an endangered quality in humanity? In addition, is the lack of respect for the property and dignity of others a symptom of a deeper, more insidious disease afflicting humanity?
Linn suggests that the recent worldwide protests against corporate greed may in fact be a conscious or subconscious contemporary response to this apparent loss of respect. She investigates this theory as she reviews the development of post-World War II pluralistic economic societies and other significant developments of the area of industrialization. By exploring these ideas, Linn, a psychotherapist, has come to the conclusion that we have lost respect in general during our past journey from preindustrial times to pluralistic economic societies.
She also questions the fact of more aggressive behaviors in our societies in light of the recent, increasingly disastrous behaviors of Mother Nature, considering this coincidence from a metaphysical level of understanding us as a human species in the world in which we live.
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