Aftermath: Prepare For and Survive Apocalypse 2012

Book by Joseph Lawrence E

1

Here Comes the Sun

although the date would stump most trivia buffs, September 2, 1859, is when the greatest magnetic storm ever recorded hit the Earth. It is also the date likeliest to be replayed in 2012, with one important difference: this time, the devastation will be colossal.

The Carrington event, named after Richard Carrington, the amateur British astronomer who took the lead in observing and explaining it, was actually a one-two punch that uppercut the Earth over the course of a week. The first of the two massive solar explosions began forming some-time in mid-August 1859, when an unusually large sunspot appeared on the northwest portion of the Sun's face. On August 27, it erupted like a zit, shooting out a Moon-sized glob of plasma, or supercharged gas. Such blasts are known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs).

CMEs are usually shaped like croissants, according to a discovery made in 2009 by STEREO, a pair of NASA probes that flank the Sun and photograph these explosions from opposite sides. According to Angelos Vourlidas of the Naval Research Laboratory, a computer model designer for the STEREO mission, CMEs are formed in a manner akin to that of twisting the ends of a rope around and around, tighter and tighter, until the middle bulges out. Instead of rope, Slinky-like lines of magnetic force twist out of the sunspots. Eventually, after enough twisting, the crescent-shaped coil of plasma snaps free and spins away from the Sun at a million miles per hour or more, which is just what happened in the Carrington event.

The first cosmic croissant of the Carrington event hit Earth the next day, August 28, 1859, causing some of the most beautiful auroras ever seen. The northern lights don't normally extend down to Havana, Cuba, but this time they did, making the sky there appear as though it were stained with blood and on fire.

On September 1, 1859, the Sun erupted again, even more furiously. According to scientists' reconstructions, the second Carrington CME was dozens of times more powerful than average, weighing in at about 10 billion tons and 10 trillion trillion watts (trillions of times more than the sum total of all electrical, mechanical, combustible, muscular, animal, and plant energy than has been produced or consumed in the history of the planet). Traveling at about 5 million miles per hour, it was also one of the fastest ever recorded. Think of a tennis ball machine suddenly rifling out a (molten, radioactive) basketball.

When CMEs launch, they create a shockwave that slaps the solar wind, a sphere of charged particles, mostly protons. This impact causes what is known as an SEP (solar energetic particle) event, which accelerates everything in its path exponentially; most of these supercharged particles take an hour or less to reach the Earth's atmosphere, where they fuse nitrogen and oxygen atoms to create nitrates, which eventually settle as dust onto the poles. Although the Carrington SEP is generally considered the largest on record, back then no one noticed it because there were no instruments sensitive enough to detect it. (Evidence of the 1859 SEP impact has since been found in anomalous nitrate-laden ice core samples that date back to that time.) Today, there are satellite-borne instruments sensitive enough to detect SEPs, most of which would probably have been fried by the Carrington event's ferocity. Indeed, far lesser SEPs are blamed for having disabled a number of spacecraft, including Japan's Nozomi satellite, dooming that nation's mission to Mars. SEPs also threaten astronauts; a Carrington-scale event would imperil those aboard the International Space Station.

At 4:50 GMT on September 2, 1859, the second and by far the more powerful Carrington CME barreled into the Earth, fifteen to twenty hours behind the SEP shockwave it had detonated. The CME made quite a splash in the headlines, sizzling telegraph wires, causing fires, and filling the sky with an auroral glow that made midnight as bright as noon.

"The electricity that attended this beautiful phenomenon took possession of the magnetic wires throughout the country, and there were numerous side displays in the telegraph offices where fantastical and unreadable messages came through the instruments, and where the atmospheric fireworks assumed shape and substance in brilliant sparks," reported the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. The electrical blasts were so powerful that some telegraph operators disconnected the batteries to their equipment and were still able to send and receive messages just operating on the power that was heavenly supplied.

Were we hit today by a geomagnetic storm of equivalent strength to the Carrington event, our civilization could well be plunged into chaos. This is not an exaggeration. Rather, it is the consensus of those who presented at the National Academy of Sciences' report Severe Space Weather Events: Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts, published in December 2008. The report's executive summary says:

Because of the interconnectedness of critical infrastructures in modern society, the impacts of severe space weather events can go beyond disruption of existing technical systems and lead to short-term as well as to long-term collateral socioeconomic disruptions. Electric power is modern society's cornerstone technology, the technology on which virtually all other infrastructures and services depend...Collateral effects of a longer-term outage [such as would almost certainly result from a Carrington-scale space weather event] would likely include, for example, disruption of the transportation, communication, banking, and finance systems, and government services; the breakdown of the distribution of potable water owing to pump failure and the loss of perishable foods and medications because of lack of refrigeration. The resulting loss of services for a significant period of time in even one region of the country could affect the entire nation and have international impact as well.

Contributors from NASA, NOAA (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration), the Smithsonian Institution, the United States Air Force, a number of major universities, and advanced technology corporations gave evidence that a contemporary Carrington-scale event would lead to deep and widespread social disruption. Basic to this contention are the enormous changes to the United States' infrastructure over the past century and a half. Modern society is utterly dependent on electricity. The electrical system is the master system upon which all others depend. And it is vulnerable to historically large space weather events.

"Emergency services would be strained, and command and control might be lost," concludes the committee of National Academy of Sciences researchers, chaired by Daniel Baker, director of LASP, the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Baker's concern about the consequences of space weather is quite a turnabout for LASP researchers. Readers of my previous book might recall the part where I attended a solar physics conference in Colorado sponsored by LASP, only to find that the scientists assembled there were utterly indifferent to a space weather freak-out occurring even as they met. The week of September 7-13, 2005, right after Hurricane Katrina and just before Rita and Wilma, goes down as one of the stormiest periods ever recorded on the Sun, but at the LASP conference, which began on September 13, no one even mentioned this astonishing situation, not even during the coffee breaks.

What no one at LASP or any other space laboratory has ever disagreed with, however, is that the fiercest solar storms usually occur at the climax of the eleven-year solar cycle, which, by general scientific consensus, is next due in late 2012 or early 2013.

Space Weather Blues

With so much hanging in the balance, one might think there would be legions of space weather experts scanning the sky for signs of impending catastrophe, that the best and the brightest would be lining up for a chance, quite literally, to save the world. But much of the talk at the May 2008 workshop that gave rise to the National Academy of Sciences' report was about how hard it is to get people interested in space weather. Students don't sign up for the classes, and when, in rare instances, such coursework is required, their eyes glaze over, according to Paul Kintner, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Cornell University.

The air force, responsible for all U.S. assets in space, has tried to overcome this indifference by offering extended space weather education at air force expense, but the number of expert space weather forecasters has nonetheless declined steadily.

"The DOD is striving to increase the sampling of the space weather environment for the coming solar maximum [in 2011-2012] and beyond," says Major Herbert Keyser, United States Air Force Weather Agency. However, he also notes that expertise in space weather is a national resource that is quickly disappearing.

European efforts aren't going any better, their space weather activities being described as "complicated" and "highly fragmented." Russia has a creditable program, as do China, India, and Japan, though most of this effort seems oriented toward their respective space programs rather than protecting us here on the ground.

Why so ho-hum? For one thing, there's almost no budget. The world's principal supplier of space weather information, the Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC), operated by NOAA, has what was referred to as an "unstable budget of $6 to $7 million per year." True, the SWPC shares resources with NASA and also the Air Force Weather Agency (AFWA), but still, given the stakes involved, it's a piddling amount. The deeper reason, one suspects, is that we have not really gotten whacked yet, not hard like the way an 1859 or 1921 storm would, in the Internet Age, be the glitch to end all glitches, and perhaps even to end any memory of what a computer glitch ever was.

"It was lamented that, in the ey...