Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

daily.jstor.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 158 posts

Re: The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

#111

Post by pixl97 »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #51
Aerbil313 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A global disaster is very different from a local one. I suggest you review your faith in The Almighty We. Civilization has never been more fragile in history than it is now.

Would it be global or would it only be the side of the Earth that was facing the Sun at the time of impact?

Not the side, it's about the hemisphere. And in general the northern hemisphere is weaker to intrusions by powerful electromagnetic events (would have to lookup why again). It also turns out that most of the worlds population is in the northern hemisphere above the tropic of cancer.

Re: The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

#112

Post by pixl97 »

rootusrootus wrote: post #108
housebear wrote: post #95

Check out A Canticle for Leibowitz for an entertaining (and often depressing) read on life restarting after an extinction event. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz "Set in a Catholic monastery in the desert of the southwestern United States after a devastating nuclear war, the book spans thousands of years as civilization rebuilds itself. The monks of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz preserve the…

And then of course after mankind recovers and rebuilds to the same technological level, they start another nuclear war. Figures.

Time does not repeat, but it does rhyme in a phrase that ends in global thermonuclear war.

Re: The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

#113

Post by pixl97 »

namlem wrote: post #76
bigyax wrote: post #43

A 1 percent chance of happening in the next decade. It's the inevitability of it that's most terrifying, society will fundamentally collapse, there's no way we could prepare for how rapidly our lives would be changed, and absolutely nothing we can do to to stop it. Only hope is that for when it happens it's far enough down the road for technology to have adapted to bring enough resiliency and/or redundancy into the g…

We could decouple transformers to stop them from being destroyed. Wiring is easy to repair, it's the transformers that are vulnerable.

We 'could' at least in theory. The actual response I expect is something closer to "don't look up"

Re: The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

#114

Post by dboreham »

hattmall wrote: post #88
Turskarama wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big risk is a bunch of transformers blow up, essentially taking the grid down. Since we would have to bootstrap the grid again without the advantage of the grid... this would likely set civilization back pretty far, a new dark age is far from impossible.

Don't modern transformers have surge decoupling devices? The same thing happens with lightning and long transmission lines and isn't that why lights will flicker during storms.

Yes but not the same order of magnitude transient as we're discussing here. E.g. a fuse isn't a fuse if you force a gazillion joule transient through it. Current keep on flowing. Same with shunt protection: it can't shunt all the transient energy before it vaporizes.

Re: The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

#115

Post by jcalvinowens »

dskrepps wrote: post #9

I've wondered for a while. Lots of people seem to think a Carrington Event will simply fry all small electronics and make everything stop working, but from my understanding all it'll actually do is cause power surges in long transmission lines and disrupt wireless signals. Apparently telegraph lines sparked and shocked people. So what effect will that actually have now? Will a massive power surge go through my house…

DC current on long transmission lines saturates mains transformer cores, turning the high voltage primary into a short circuit at the peaks of the "unlucky" side of the AC waveform.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9652509

> When CMEs strike the magnetic field of the Earth which provides protection against the fast-moving plasma becomes compressed and results in a varying magnetic field on the ground. This magnetic field variation generates a geoelectric field on the Earth’s surface and leads to Geomagnetically Induced Current flow through man-made technology. This GIC exhibits a very low-frequency quasi-Direct Current (DC) (less than 1 Hz) with amplitudes of 10–15 A and up to 300 A peak current for 1–2 minutes that flows along conductors and technological infrastructure. The power transformers which are connected by transmission lines are the most affected by GIC events. The GIC enters from the neutral ground point of the star-connected (wye) transformer windings and divides equally among the phases. When the GIC flows through the transformer windings, a DC magnetic flux is generated in the core, whose magnitude depends on the GIC flow magnitude. This DC flux is then superimposed on the AC flux in such a way that the asymmetrical saturation takes place in the magnetic cores of the transformers (half-cycle saturation) and increases their reactive power consumptions critically.

> During saturation phenomenon, transformers draw an extremely large asymmetrical exciting distorted current that is rich in even and odd harmonics. These harmonics can trigger the relays improperly, overheating the generators and transformer’s windings and cores, leading to unstable operations of the power system and could result in long-term damage to the system’s components. These effects may turn into catastrophic failures (i.e., permanent damage or blackouts) if they persist for a few minutes. The 1989 geomagnetic storm in North America that lead to severe economic losses is an example of such catastrophic consequence due to the effects of GIC.

Re: The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

#116

Post by alted »

bigyax wrote: post #43

A 1 percent chance of happening in the next decade. It's the inevitability of it that's most terrifying, society will fundamentally collapse, there's no way we could prepare for how rapidly our lives would be changed, and absolutely nothing we can do to to stop it. Only hope is that for when it happens it's far enough down the road for technology to have adapted to bring enough resiliency and/or redundancy into the g…

The probability may actually be much higher: about 12% per decade for a -850mT event; 1.5% for -1700mT [1].

Wikipedia estimates the Carrington was anywhere from -800 to -1750 [2].

[1] "On the probability of occurrence of extreme space weather events", Pete Riley, 2012, doi:10.1029/2011SW000734

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event

Re: The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

#117

Post by replygirl »

borbulon wrote: post #34
Turskarama wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big risk is a bunch of transformers blow up, essentially taking the grid down. Since we would have to bootstrap the grid again without the advantage of the grid... this would likely set civilization back pretty far, a new dark age is far from impossible.

having lived in the tech age, I'm not completely against that idea.

starvation and dysentery at the same time appeal to you?

Re: The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

#118

Post by toss1 »

pixl97 wrote: post #106
toss1 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

THIS!! It would be relatively cheap (I've reak ~$500million) to build and store a mostly complete replacement set of transformers. The difference it would make in a Carrington+ event (or a EMP nuclear attack) is insane. Without them, likely the grid collapses for years, along with distribution, food, etc. Millions die in the years-decades it takes to recover. With the transformer standby inventory, critical parts of…

Honestly this is one of those events where billions could possibly die. Green revolution. The level of food we need requires nitrogen. This is broken down by natural gas into fertilizer and requires immense amount of energy and transportation. When the grid gets knocked out, you're on a countdown till you run out of gas/petrol. If you don't get enough power back up before this happens you're running into a game over…

Yup, it could really go down that way.

When animal populations overbreed and/or their feed under-grows, a 10% overpopulation often results in not a 10% shaving of population, but a 90% population crash, because almost every animal goes under the survival budget.

It would very much the same here.

Excellent point about the EEs (and other high-capability engineers, mechanics, technicians required to keep it all running) being in the dying population. Absolutely right - if the critical mass of available experts fails, the system never recovers. Only after society stabilizes, regrows, and re-creates the knowledge; by then, it would be about rebuilding from scratch.

Re: The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

#119

Post by ianburrell »

api wrote: post #32
dividedbyzero wrote: post #28

As far as Carrington-like events are concerned I believe consensus is that most equipment and electronics would be fine, satellites would take damage, radio communication would be out, the electrical grid would go down and be hard to restart, but at least the most important grid transformers would be protected and survive the event, as would cars, computers and machinery. Would a Miyazake event change that meaningful…

If they are many times larger it sounds like they could be more like an EMP from a thermonuclear bomb. Looks like they happen on average every few thousand years. We really should be looking at how we recover from such an event, and whether we can do things in the design of power grids to minimize damage. If there were humans living on the Moon or Mars these seem like they could be even more fatal unless they were li…

Electronics should be fine from solar flares and EMP. The confusion about electronics being damaged comes from nearby and high-altitude EMP behaving differently. Nearby EMP damages electronics. High-altitude EMP induces current in long conductors. Solar flares behave similarly to high-altitude EMP, but whole hemisphere.

Re: The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

#120

Post by stareatgoats »

dskrepps wrote: post #9

I've wondered for a while. Lots of people seem to think a Carrington Event will simply fry all small electronics and make everything stop working, but from my understanding all it'll actually do is cause power surges in long transmission lines and disrupt wireless signals. Apparently telegraph lines sparked and shocked people. So what effect will that actually have now? Will a massive power surge go through my house…

Good grief. Here is a thread of currently 58 comments (off the back of a erstwhile top comment no doubt) talking about the effects of a Carrington event. And granted, this is what is mentioned in the title here. But you just need to click on the article title to see that the title continues, with "A “Miyake Event” Would Be Far Worse", and the article goes on to explain how a Miyake event is orders of magnitude worse than a Carrington event.

One may conclude that if our modern society gets hit with such an event it's likely game over, at least as far as modernity is concerned.

That be as it may - this is the second time in a few days that I experience a severe and disappointing lack of interest in the actual linked text. A downside of the karma/gamification aspect here? Is it getting worse?

Post reply on HN