Australian Lab Notes - March 2011 - Steve Turvey

2012 the year of the CME !

I caught one of my kids watching the disaster movie 2012 the other day. The professional in me considers this film to be scientifically the shonkiest movie since “The Core”, but it’s an awfully entertaining flick thanks to its over-the-top special effects. The disastrously rendered scenario for 2012 was that the Sun suddenly started spewing out “mutated” neutrinos (stop sniggering) that subsequently heated the Earth’s mantle, triggering bedlam.

At about the same time I noticed a little news item - that the year 2012 is actually forecast to be a particularly nasty year for solar flares and Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs). CMEs have been in the news quite a bit lately, but attract little interest from most of us. No doubt they are closely followed by the inevitable doomsdayers warning,” the end is nigh”. So what’s the truth? Is there any risk?

Actually yes! While suggesting CMEs will return us to the Iron Age may be a bit of an overstatement, it turns out that big CME’s are indeed the bane of modern technology.

A CME is, in effect, a large storm in space. This storm comprises radiation and fast-moving, charged particles that can disrupt the earth’s magnetosphere, which is effectively our protective force field against nasties such as cosmic radiation (of which a colourful side effect is the Aurora or Northern/Southern Lights caused by radiation crashing into the upper atmosphere).

Some of you might recall that in 1989, a large chunk of Canada was plunged into darkness when a strong, but by no means the largest that Earth has experienced, CME struck. This instantly overloaded Canada’s power grid, burning out transformers all over the place. What is perhaps less well known is that back in 1859, a much larger a CME than Canada’s, seriously interfered with the newly invented telegraph, shorting it out and starting many fires. That CME was so powerful that the Northern Lights (usually only seen in Canada and northern USA) were visible as far south as Cuba.

Had the 1859 event occurred today, it would have found more than a basic telegraph network to wreak havoc upon.

To put this in perspective, most electronic equipment is (hopefully) designed to withstand a typical or average CME (based on the last 100 years or so). However, the 1859 event was much larger than anything we’ve experienced in the last 100 years. And there are geological records that suggest the 1859 event is not a one off. Equivalent or larger events have occurred at quite regular intervals in the past.

So if we are hit by a large CME, what should we expect other than a pretty light show in the sky over Brisbane?

Assuming the CME doesn’t wipe out GPS satellites entirely, the old joke about your GPS guiding your car into a lake is highly likely. For quite a few days the signals from satellites will be incorrect and positioning on your GPS will be very inaccurate. Of course, if the event is powerful enough, your car’s own GPS unit could be fried too, along with your car’s engine-computer and any other electronic gizmos on board. You probably wouldn’t be driving anywhere. So add to that list, cell phones - forget them, landlines - ditto, TV - probably fried as well.

A CME, if it’s large enough, can punch right through our magnetosphere and will fry any electronics on the ground, not just the satellites outside our atmosphere. A large CME can also seriously deplete the Ozone layer. In extreme cases the solar wind, which is no longer impeded by our magnet field (a tangled mess until it reforms) can strip away part of the atmosphere.

There are probably a few of you thinking this could be a good thing, back to the good old days reading a book. But I think you would be in for a shock. With no electricity you no longer have your washing machine, so boiling water over a wood fire and scrubbing your smalls by hand is something you’d quickly grow to loath. No microwave, no electric kettle, no fridge and no electric cookers - the list of life’s true essentials goes on. It would potentially take quite some time to get the power grid up again because no-one has large stocks of transformers sitting around for this scenario.

Interestingly, our sun is one of the most well behaved stars observed by astronomers. Other stars in the same class as our sun have been observer to produce CME events millions of times more powerful than our gentle star. CMEs of this magnitude would mean extinction events, forget cell phones, it’s us that would be fried.