Awaiting the next historic solar storm (earthsky.org)

[eppur_se_muova]

Posted by Kelly Kizer Whitt in Human World | Sun | March 31, 2021

Powerful solar storms can hammer Earth, causing major technology glitches. One of the best-remembered events is the Quebec power grid failure of 1989, a 12-hour blackout in which millions of people found themselves in dark office buildings, stalled elevators, and underground pedestrian tunnels. Going farther back, there’s the famous Carrington Event of 1859, which fried telegraph wires. Scientists agree it’s only a matter of time until the next powerful solar storm affects earthly technologies. Next time, we might expect steeper consequences, since today’s world relies so heavily on technology. But, with few events to go on, no one knows when the next powerful Earth-directed event will erupt on the sun. That’s one reason researchers were happy to announce in March 2021 that they’ve unearthed new eyewitness accounts from a 1582 solar storm that startled skywatchers across the globe.

Pero Ruiz Soares was a 16th-century Portuguese author in Lisbon. He and his contemporaries were unaware of the connection between solar storms and the northern lights when he wrote of the 1582 event:

A great fire appeared in the sky to the north, and lasted three nights.

All that part of the sky appeared burning in fiery flames; it seemed that the sky was burning. Nobody remembered having seen something like that … At midnight, great fire rays arose above the castle which were dreadful and fearful. The following day, it happened the same at the same hour but it was not so great and terrifying. Everybody went to the countryside to see this great sign.

According to a statement from scientists who studied the event:

Across the globe in feudal Japan, observers in Kyoto noted the same fiery red display in their skies, too. Similar accounts of strange nighttime lights were recorded in Leipzig, Germany; Yecheon, South Korea; and a dozen other cities across Europe and East Asia.

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more: https://earthsky.org/human-world/next-solar-storm-carrington-event-historic-aurora
https://www.swsc-journal.org/articles/swsc/full_html/2020/01/swsc190083/swsc190083.html


Not exactly LBN, but I missed this earlier and it seemed interesting enough to share.

[abqtommy]

1. Thanks for sharing this.

[captain queeg]

2. I attended a workshop several years ago at a wind farm

I don’t remember what the theme was but I was surprised to see some NASA scientists on the agenda. They talked about this issue of solar storms. They aren’t that rare but the earths orientation is important. If the earth isn’t facing the storm or flare or whatever we don’t see the impacts. There are dramatic impacts to the electrical grid when there’s a direct hit. Those are pretty common in geological time, say once every 100 years. Up until pretty recent human time there was no electric grid so mostly the events were just thought of as impressive meteorological events. But these guys had gone thru historical shipping reports. I guess the idea of a ships log has been around for a long time, and they found many events recorded. That’s where they predicted an average of one every 100 years. And the effects on the modern grid will be catastrophic.

[NH Ethylene]

3. That's interesting about the shipping logs.

What a treasure trove they must be.