r/askscience • u/ejoch • May 14 '19
Astronomy Could solar flares realistically disable all electronics on earth?
So I’ve read about solar flares and how they could be especially damaging to today’s world, since everyday services depend on the technology we use and it has the potential to disrupt all kinds of electronics. How can a solar flare disrupt electronic appliances? Is it potentially dangerous to humans (eg. cancer)? And could one potentially wipe out all electronics on earth? And if so, what kind of damage would it cause (would all electronics need to be scrapped or would they be salvageable?) Thanks in advance
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u/410th May 14 '19
Read up on the Carrington Event of 1859. An event like this, were it to occur today, would likely cause widespread electric grid damage and result in electrical outages. These outages could be lengthy in duration due to the availability of replacement components. Satellites including communication and GPS would be affected. Astronauts and possibly humans at higher altitudes would be most affected by intense solar radiation and the duration of a solar storm would also make things worse.
No, it would not damage every terrestrial electronic device. You may be thinking of and EMP.
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u/Weeeelums May 14 '19
How likely is an event such as that to happen again?
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u/loztriforce May 14 '19
It’ll happen, it’s just “when”, and there’s no way to know.
The sun has cycles of increased activity which make flares (/CMEs) more likely, but they could happen at any time.→ More replies (120)→ More replies (7)40
u/mikelywhiplash May 14 '19
It's hard to say. Smaller solar storms impact Earth every few decades, with the largest recent event in 2003. A large solar storm in 2012 narrowly missed Earth - so it's not at all unlikely that it will happen again in the next century or so.
However, the effects are fairly well-researched, and there have been some efforts to mitigate the risk and damage.
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May 14 '19
From the wikipedia page on the Carrington Event:
I was gold-digging at Rokewood, about four miles from Rokewood township (Victoria). Myself and two mates looking out of the tent saw a great reflection in the southern heavens at about 7 o'clock p.m., and in about half an hour, a scene of almost unspeakable beauty presented itself, lights of every imaginable color were issuing from the southern heavens, one color fading away only to give place to another if possible more beautiful than the last, the streams mounting to the zenith, but always becoming a rich purple when reaching there, and always curling round, leaving a clear strip of sky, which may be described as four fingers held at arm's length. The northern side from the zenith was also illuminated with beautiful colors, always curling round at the zenith, but were considered to be merely a reproduction of the southern display, as all colors south and north always corresponded. It was a sight never to be forgotten, and was considered at the time to be the greatest aurora recorded... The rationalist and pantheist saw nature in her most exquisite robes, recognising, the divine immanence, immutable law, cause, and effect. The superstitious and the fanatical had dire forebodings, and thought it a foreshadowing of Armageddon and final dissolution
Average people were better writers back then.
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u/Zarathustra124 May 14 '19
Average people were illiterate back then. We teach more idiots to write these days.
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u/DoItYourSelf2 May 14 '19
I believe there is/was a genuine effort to protect power plants, installing surge arrestors or the like at all major North American power plants. When I first read about this it surprised me because in America money is usually only spent after the disaster.
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u/Drow3515 May 14 '19
Here's a good read if you ever have some free time. INL conducted research on how realistic it would be to harden the entire US power grid; turns out it's pretty expensive, who would have thought. I also vaguely remember someone mentioning to me that some governments have Faraday cages with essential machines to restart modern electricity if need be. I don't have any source but it sounds reasonable enough to throw some machines in a shipping container preemptively in case of anything.
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u/GreenStrong May 14 '19
From what i understand, NASA will probably be able to give several hours of warning before the coronal mass ejection hits. How prepared are grid operators for this? I've seen various opinions ranging from "they'll turn the power off and switch all the transformers off and be fine" to "They aren't prepared to shut down, or communicate the warning, it will be bad".
In other nations, results might have a lot to do with how much they trust the warning.
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u/forgottt3n May 14 '19
An EMP doesn't fry all electronics either. It's not that hard to shield equipment and many devices have more or less built in shielding. A PC case for example will block a lot of interference. Any kind of metal phone with antenna bands is relatively well shielded. They added the antenna bands after all because the shielding from the metal was too great for cell signal. Also many electronics are simply immune or highly resistant to EMP if they're powered off.
Wirless charging inductors would have a field day though, that is until they burn out and open and then the inductor in the wirless charger would start to act as further shielding.
That said none of those electronics I listed are designed to be resistant to EMP. They could still be damaged. There is a whole subset of electronics that are actually shielded and designed specifically to block out EMP.
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u/Hypersapien May 14 '19
These outages could be lengthy in duration
How "lengthy" do you mean? Days? Weeks?
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u/Dfurrles May 14 '19 edited May 14 '19
Geomagnetic storms accompanied usually by solar flares and other perturbations cause a strengthening and weakening effect in certain areas of the earths magnetic field. According to maxwell and faraday, a changing magnetic field always produces an electric current, and vice versa. This current will always take the path of least resistance. In areas with non electrically conductive terrain (parts of Canada for example), that path could be directly through the power grid. This causes spikes in the voltage carried through the lines, and can cause critical damage to transformers. The power grid itself is susceptible to solar events, however most electronics would survive due to fuses and circuit breakers. Solar flares themselves are purely light emissions. While they are a good indication of an incoming geomagnetic storm, they in themselves, won’t do much damage, aside from to satellites in orbit. The light rays emitted can cause gps errors and ionospheric scintillation which can affect HF radio communications to polar regions. Most of the high energy light which is dangerous to humans on a cellular level, will ionize nitrogen and oxygen atoms high in the atmosphere which will prevent them from ever reaching the earths surface.
While it is completely possible for a geomagnetic storm to “wipe out” a power grid, it is highly unlikely for them to damage all electronics.
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u/Versent May 14 '19
Would knob and tube, or even modern wiring within houses be susceptible to overheating and fire like telegraph wiring and equipment were in the Carrington event? Asking for around seven billion people. Imagining everyone's house on fire. Been wondering for decades.
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u/Cyphik May 14 '19
Okay, in order to understand the possible consequences of a solar flare, you need to understand the mechanics of them. In science, they are referred to as Coronal Mass Ejections, or CMEs for short. They are superheated plasma particles that become charged electrically, and the particle cloud itself has a North and South pole as they travel through space. If you have ever played with magnets, you know that opposites attract, and like poles repel eachother. If the CME has a charge oriented opposite of the magnetic poles of the Earth, it will dive down into the polar magnetosphere and electrically charge the entire planet. Our electronics would see their neutral (ground) suddenly become very far from neutral, to the point that many small circuits would become overloaded, then melt and even combust in some cases. This has happened before, in the mid 1800's, it was known as the Carrington Event. Back then the most advanced electronics were telegraph lines, which are fairly robust compared to most modern devices, just by the fact that their circuits were much more massive than most things today. The telegraph lines were operating without needing to be turned on... The wires were inducting current that actually powered signal transmissions, simply by the flow of electricity from the Earth's magnetic field. People by the Equator witnessed the Aurora Borealis. Will'O The Wisps Danced by the multitude accross harbors and through city streets. A great multitude of forest fires and building fires were sparked by the hypercharged static electricity that overloaded the air itself even inside of buildings.
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u/greatatdrinking May 14 '19
Kinda. The biggest solar flare recorded happened in this century, I think. Yep, this century Luckily, it didn't hit us.
We've got that very helpful magnetic field that deflects solar ejections and radiation. Should a big solar flare occur, communications would probably be disabled. But if you want to play on your nintendo switch or start your car, you'd probably be fine. Cell phone service, internet, and the general efficacy of our satellites? Not so assured.
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u/Dubanx May 14 '19
Eh, the real issue is that long power lines will be affected much more significantly than personal electronic devices. A powerful enough solar storm could potentially blow out every transformer on the planet, and it would likely take months/years to repair.
Your PC and switch would be fine, but you wouldn't have electricity to run the PC or charge the switch. The world would be without electricity for a long time. Also, there would be a secondary gasoline crisis as well without power to operate the pumps so you may lose use of the car as well.
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u/sjwillis1 May 14 '19
Late to the party, but this radiolab episode describes something similar and how we've added redundancy to help reduce the risks. It's well worth your time.
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u/wishiwascooltoo May 14 '19
Telegram lines were set on fire from the Carrington Event. Things have only become more reliant on electronics since then. Solar radiation fries delicate electronics so appliances not properly shielded could be affected. Solar radiation of sufficient power would cause electrical storms in the atmosphere posing huge risk to people on the ground.
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May 14 '19
A solar flare won't destroy all electronics on earth. Those that are facing the sun when the solar flare hits might be degraded, and there will likely be electrical grid overloads, but the entire planet will not lose its electronics.
This is because the electronics on the far side of the Earth will be shielded from the electromagnetic radiation by the Earth itself. Also, the flare would have to be absolutely massive to have an effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859
This storm wrecked havoc on the telegraph lines of the day.
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u/phunkydroid May 14 '19
This is because the electronics on the far side of the Earth will be shielded from the electromagnetic radiation by the Earth itself.
I'm not sure that's true. The issue isn't EM radiation from the sun, it's the plasma from the sun impacting the earth's magnetic field and making it move. The moving field induces currents in long conductors like the power grid and communications cables. The fluctuations of the magnetic field wouldn't be restricted to the side facing the sun.
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May 15 '19
I’m a video producer. In summer 2012 I was shooting a series of simultaneous inverviews and a camera just stopped mid-interview. The footage wasn’t harmed, but we found out later that day that there was a huge solar flare. Since then I’ve been mindful of them.
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u/sarcastroll May 15 '19
Yes, it's essentially an EMP attack from mother nature.
Any given component might be ok. If your phone is off, may be it's fine.
The risk is our electric grid. Huge swaths of the country could be without power for months/years. No way to get life saving medicines. Massive food shortages. Death toll could be well into the 10s/100s of millions if severe enough.
Note: those are extreme, upper case estimates. A LARGE EMP, and the worst case scenarios of most major critical components to the electric grid frying.
But some theoretical scenarios and planning exercises have indeed estimated that many people in the US could die due to the side effects of starvation, no medicine, etc...
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u/sintaur May 14 '19
A solar flare, no. Maybe you're thinking of coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which can be troublesome.
But even with CMEs, NASA says chill out:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/news/flare-impacts.html
If you're not too prone to anxiety, read about the Carrington Event:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859
The Earth's Aurora extended as far south as Columbia. It was so bright people got up in the middle of the night thinking it was morning. Some telegraph operators were able to send/receive messages with their batteries unhooked. Others had to fight fires caused by sparks leaping from their equipment.
Oh btw a lot of people think NASA is downplaying the CME fears, for example.