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Researchers identify largest ever solar storm in 14k-year-old tree rings

phys.org

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Re: Researchers identify largest ever solar storm in 14k-year-old tree rings

#111

Post by KMag »

nickpeterson wrote: post #104
KMag wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: simplified version of my assertion: current budgets are X. It would cost Y to harden infrastructure against an event 10 times as large as the Carrington event. Even if it were trivial to increase the budget from X to X+Y, it's probably not a good use of money to perform such extreme hardening. This is true for all positive finite values for X and Y in a world where we still have cancer, heart disease, poverty,…

Florida has enough crazy exotic animal people that I bet the polar bear example isn’t as far fetched as you think.

I picked polar bears assuming probability of zoo (public or private) escape or ice age over the next 15k years means there's some real, but minuscule, risk.

Re: Researchers identify largest ever solar storm in 14k-year-old tree rings

#112

Post by schrectacular »

thejoneser wrote: post #105
medstrom wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The oldest living tree has seen 9,565 birthdays ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Tjikko ), but it doesn't have 9,565 rings. Even if it did, there's a gap of at least a few thousand years ;-) I'm impressed they got it exact, but wasn't by ring-counting (only).

Not necessarily. You can compare dead trees in the same vicinity that were alive at overlapping time intervals. Patterns in the width of the rings will reveal the period over which their lives overlapped. With enough dead trees, if they are preserved well enough, you could go back significantly further and age trees that are long dead.

It's called "Dendrochronology" and this is exactly how it is done. In the Northern Hemisphere they can date back at least 13,910 years.

Re: Researchers identify largest ever solar storm in 14k-year-old tree rings

#113

Post by brutusborn »

hyperthesis wrote: post #93
surfsvammel wrote: post #72

We really need to start harden our grid and in all ways prepare for something like this. It will happen again and I suspect we will say: “no one could have predicted it” once it does.

but consider the standard used for water grid 'hardening': 1-in-100-year flood

With better tooling this kind of status quo will change. Choosing a single worst case for design is a product of manual design processes. With modern computer technology we can run multiple cases easily, so we can now use probabilistic engineering techniques.

In the future it won’t be “this bridge is good for 1 in 100 year storm” but “this bridge has a 99.99% chance of surviving every storm during its design life.” That will include the very rare events beyond the 100 year horizon.

Re: Researchers identify largest ever solar storm in 14k-year-old tree rings

#114

Post by idiotsecant »

ryanblakeley wrote: post #42
dakial1 wrote: post #2

>A similar solar storm today would be catastrophic for modern technological society—potentially wiping out telecommunications and satellite systems, causing massive electricity grid blackouts, and costing us billions of pounds. I wonder if any country has a disaster recovery plan for this kind on event.

I interviewed a guy from the NOAA to ask about that. The gist is 1) the military has hardened satellites 2) they have a phone-tree system for alerting grid operators and 3) many high voltage transformers have back-up systems in hardened storage. [1] https://ryanblakeley.net/p/solar-flare

I won't comment on 1 and 2 but 3) is laughably untrue. I guess the word 'many' might be stretched to mean 'a few' but I've worked at more than one very large utility directly as an engineer responsible for design of large generation and transmission interface systems and these transformers are not only not spare, they're almost impossible to get quickly even at current market demand. If you toasted even 10 percent of the large generation and transmission transformers in North America it would be years before the grid would even come close to working again, and that's if there was nation state level resources applied.

These are specialized machines that require specialized labor and specialized materials from a specialized international supply chain to construct. I'd make the bet that total recovery would be decades.

Re: Researchers identify largest ever solar storm in 14k-year-old tree rings

#115

Post by throwaway837367 »

deepmauka wrote: post #108
rini17 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How it gets damaged? For comparison lightning is stronger than solar flares but only rarely damages stored unconnected equipment.

The earth and everything in and on it is part of an electrical system, as solar emissions wash across the landscape they’ll stimulate the flow of electrons in everything especially metal and circuit based items. Since circuits in many items are delicate things, designed for very specific currents, it will be a near guarantee that electrical components will be damaged.

This is incorrect. A solar flare is not like an EMP. It's low frequency so only wires that are miles long would be energized. It could possibly destroy electronics that aren't protected by a power strip. But no, it's not going to destroy your cellphone or the electronics in your car.

Re: Researchers identify largest ever solar storm in 14k-year-old tree rings

#117

Post by lazide »

kristopolous wrote: post #92
beebeepka wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "...in some cases giving their operators electric shocks. Telegraph pylons threw sparks" The real life precursor of exploding starship screens/consoles

There was a great radio ecoshock episode about this a couple years ago. Let me see if I can dig it up. https://www.ecoshock.org/2017/03/emp-instant-blackout.html The guy's journalistic style is certainly on the alarmist side but the scholarship is pretty solid and unusually expansive. From the text: "Because most utilities have not protected their giant transformers, and there are no replacements, the grid would stay…

Return of the gas lamps!

Seriously though. It wouldn’t be hard to make a dynamo and some incandescent (or carbon arc!) lights with material already available in most metropolises. The bars would get prioritized, hah.

Re: Researchers identify largest ever solar storm in 14k-year-old tree rings

#118

Post by greggsy »

PaulHoule wrote: post #97
greggsy wrote: post #96

> occurring precisely 14,300 years ago. …precisely? Really?

You can count individual tree rings, so yeah.

That’s not how they got to that figure, which is 50% greater than the oldest known tree… (and I don’t think they even counted the rings for that one)

Re: Researchers identify largest ever solar storm in 14k-year-old tree rings

#119

Post by foobarian »

idiotsecant wrote: post #114
ryanblakeley wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed a guy from the NOAA to ask about that. The gist is 1) the military has hardened satellites 2) they have a phone-tree system for alerting grid operators and 3) many high voltage transformers have back-up systems in hardened storage. [1] https://ryanblakeley.net/p/solar-flare

I won't comment on 1 and 2 but 3) is laughably untrue. I guess the word 'many' might be stretched to mean 'a few' but I've worked at more than one very large utility directly as an engineer responsible for design of large generation and transmission interface systems and these transformers are not only not spare, they're almost impossible to get quickly even at current market demand. If you toasted even 10 percent of…

This keeps coming up and I keep wondering how in the world are large transformers that complicated to build. And I don't mean that in a dismissive way but a "boy do I have a gap in my knowledge of the world" way :-)

Re: Researchers identify largest ever solar storm in 14k-year-old tree rings

#120

Post by ghotli »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #76
jrd259 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

based on Larry Niven story Inconstant Moon which won the 1972 Hugo Award for best short story.

Oh. I'm adding it to my to-read queue then, and bumping Larry Niven up in the queue in general too. I've been meaning to read his works ever since I learned about Known Space / Star Trek connection.

I liked the Niven/Pournell books and I still think back to them often enough. The Mote in God's Eye and Lucifer's Hammer I think I read back to back. It's been a long time but I really enjoyed them when I was younger.
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