November 30th, 2011
An upcoming cycle of stormy solar activity risks causing damage to electrical transformers and threatening vulnerable energy infrastructure around the globe, a report by an insurance group says
The sun follows a predictable 11 year activity cycle, with the next period of stormy activity expected to begin in 2012-13
The report by German insurance group Allianz said a high impact solar storm, not easily predicted due to its recorded rarity, could cause blackouts and economic losses of over $1 trillion and that the worst case scenario would be even worse
What were coming into at the moment is the bad spaceweather period, Jim Wild of Britains Lancaster University, an expert in solar plasma physics, told Reuters
A large explosion on the surface of the sun could release billions of tonnes of superheated magnetically charged gas at a speed of a million miles per hour, and when that gas hits the earths magnetic field, it can trigger a big solar storm
The severity of a potential disruption has made experts at insurance and national security institutions take notice
When you start to imagine not having electricity in a sizeable fraction of a country or a continent for weeks or even months its serious business, Wild said
SMALL LEAD TIME
The difficulty lies in predicting how often serious solar type events occur
The small lead time given by satellites is also a problem for preventing solar storm damage, as currently no satellite is close enough to the sun to give more than an hours warning, Wild said
Updating the satellites to give the earth more preparation time would cost around $1 billion, he added
Space weather is a relatively new area of study, with sophisticated observations going back only 50 years and lacking an international coordinated tracking system such as that found with normal meteorological weather
We have very little on a solar time scale, Wild said
The most damaging storm in recent memory was a 1989 outage in Quebec, Canada, which affected six million people
The first scientific recording of a large solar storm was made in 1859 by English astronomer Richard Carrington, who observed a white light explosion on the surface of the sun
Wild said: what they didnt know back then was why about two or three days later you could see the northern lights over Cuba and all of the telegraph system was disrupted by geomagnetic activity.
Tags: Stormy, Stormy Sun
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