It’s common lore in the year 2012 that solar storms have the capability of knocking out our electrical grids and, you know, paralyzing society long enough for us to starve and/or get eaten by wolves and/or devour ourselves. Which isn’t totally untrue — solar storms blast solar winds full of charged particles occasionally in the direction of Earth, where those charged particles meet the many things on our planet we’ve created that conduct electrical charges very well, like power grids. So, solar storms can potentially cause all kinds of problems with those grids, like triggering blackouts and wrecking equipment and infrastructure. Much of our worrying has been confined to upper-latitude locales, which are more vulnerable to solar storm activity. But a new study out, courtesy of the American Geophysical Union and published in the journal Space Weather, suggests differently — even us down here in the mid-latitudes (like New York! London! Most populated places!) are vulnerable.In the grand geophysical scheme of things, power grids are a brand new phenomenon. Solar storms are as old as the planet. This means we don’t have a whole lot to study as far as interactions between the two go: there was that storm in 1989 that blacked out Quebec for nine hours, and another bad one that punished Swedish in 2003. Both are upper-latitude regions, as expected. The closer you get to the planet’s magnetic poles, the closer you are to Earth’s auroral electrojet currents, natural electric currents usually circulating about 100 km above the planet’s surface. During solar storms, these currents can grow and intensify. This why during heavy solar storm activity, you sometimes wind up with airliner traffic getting diverted into lower latitudes.Enter the solar storm of November 2001, where a burst of solar wind sent bonus current flowing through New Zealand’s power grid, setting off alarms and destroying one transformer. This is the event studied in the new report, with the takeaway that a “moderate event can have destructive effects far from the typical regions of concern,” according to the paper. A similar storm that occurred a couple of years later had far less negative effects, likely due to system upgrades/reinforcements.The study doesn’t say anything about storm effects suddenly being just as likely in lower-latitudes as they are closer to the poles, just that they’re possible down here. Which is admittedly not all that interesting given that most people I talk to about this tend to think that we’re always this close to solar storm destruction all over the planet anyhow. In any case, our grids are still a whole lot more vulnerable to terrestrial rain/wind/hail/snow storms than they are to electrical currents from the Sun, but from an apocalypse fetish standpoint, I can get the appeal of this sort of doomsday novelty for sure. Unseen forces, etc.
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